


how this one ends.

by orphan_account



Series: down in flames. [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-06-26 18:27:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 49,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19773892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “And Stiles,” he's addressed directly for the first time since this whole thing started, and when all eyes land on him this time, he just squeezes Derek's hand and squares his shoulders. He can act like this doesn't bother him. Derek can do it, and Derek's here. He'll be okay. “...how does it feel to know that millions upon millions of people are going to read intimate, private details about your life with Derek?”“It doesn't bother me,” Stiles says with a shrug, going for nonchalant and feeling like he's doing it pretty well. “I knew what I was getting into. Besides – everyone wants Derek Hale to write about them, right?”





	how this one ends.

_Maybe I'm stupid, and maybe it's a mistake, and maybe everyone is right to try and warn me, but people have been telling me what to do ever since my first book hit shelves. For once, it feels good to lock the doors and close the curtains, mute the rest of the world for five god damn minutes just to make my own decision without having to listen to anyone else. There's a certain level of freedom that the average person takes for granted in being able to look at exactly what they want, point at it, and say this, and get it. I haven't felt that in charge or in control of my own life in, honestly, years. All the money and all the status in the world, and I'm not even allowed to dictate who warms my fucking bed at night – I'm tired of it. I want, simply, what I want. And I got it, this time._  
_All of that said, there are times where I think I've made such a mistake that I just can't sleep. I listen to the steady rise and fall of his chest as he breathes, and it sounds so loud and fragile in my ears that I just can't fucking sleep. For all the control I feel like I'm gaining, another part of me is terrified that the other shoe is going to drop any day now, and I'll lose every thing that I've worked so hard and suffered so much to get. Just like that. That's just life with a human, I guess. (Beacons, Derek Hale pg. 449)_

Stiles has spent an astronomical amount of time, lately, wondering if the only reason he and Derek ever fucking got together to begin with was just because of the mates thing. It's hard not to think about it. It's an impossible feeling to describe, and he figures most of that stems from the fact that Derek knows beyond any shadow of a doubt that Stiles is it, the one, but Stiles -

He doesn't say it out loud to Derek, to anyone, not fucking ever. But...he spends a lot of time wondering. Derek doesn't.

Sometimes, he picks up those old copies of Derek's books, the ones from when he was just a stupid kid, and flips through the pages all run down from being turned over and over again, well read and well loved. Runs his fingers down the spines, traces Derek's signature in Reborn. And he just – wonders. How deep is it? What does it mean? When Stiles was just a kid, and when Derek's first book came out and when Stiles first saw it – why did he ask his dad to buy it for him? Was it fate, or a pull, or was it just...coincidence?

It's a useless road to go down, and yet he finds himself there time and time again. Looking around himself, searching. It's a place that Derek never has to visit himself.

Sometime at around four in the morning, in spite of the fact that Derek swore up and down that he'd be back by ten at the latest, the hallway light flicks on, and Lydia Martin's voice starts drifting down towards the bedroom where Stiles had left the door wide open, waiting for Derek to come back to his own damn house. Frankly, the late nights don't bother Stiles like they might bother anyone else. It's not like Derek would ever cheat on Stiles, or lie, or do anything that would make Stiles want to key the Rover in revenge (and boy, what a revenge – Derek would sigh in annoyance and buy a new one.)

The only thing Derek ever does on his mysterious I'll be back at nine – maybe ten – maybe midnight – maybe don't wait up nights is work. It's funny. Stiles always thought that being a writer meant working on your own schedule, eating gummy worms at your desk, listening to emo rock and guzzling coffee. Apparently, what being a world famous best selling celebrity author actually means is having about a dozen or so people constantly breathing down your fucking neck, deadline after deadline, sleepless nights, hoping to get a god damn night alone for once just to stumble into the bedroom already half undressed to find Lydia Martin waiting there with her arms crossed and eyebrows raised.

As a teenager, Stiles would have worshiped the actual ground Lydia walked on, if he were ever given the opportunity. As her technical client (being Derek's publicist and Stiles being Derek's boyfriend sort of instantaneously makes her Stiles' publicist as well – just not on paper. More in the fact that he can't walk out the house without Lydia telling him what to do and what not to do), Stiles has vivid fantasies of locking her in the VIP room of her idiotic BDSM club and leaving her there over night so he can get one night alone with Derek before the book comes out. That's it.

“...can't just let things take care of themselves,” Lydia is saying – to Derek, Stiles assumes. He groggily sits up in bed, glares down the lit up hallway, and can only make out the back of Lydia's head from the angle he's at. “First of all, because they won't, and second of all, the team you've hired to deal with this -”

“I write the checks.” Derek sounds run down, tired. Most of the time these days, he is. “You pick the people, you pick the places, you pick the things, and I just write the checks.”

A beat of silence. Stiles imagines that Lydia is clenching and working her jaw around all the words she'd be screaming at him if he were just her friend instead of her employer. It gets that way, when two alphas get into an argument with one another. “...the team that we hired to deal with this are incompetent and idiotic. If you're going to insist on not showing up when I ask you to -”

Derek sighs, and there's a rustle of clothing that sounds a lot like him running his hands up and down his face in frustration. Stiles plops down onto his pillow, rolling his eyes before closing his lids again to try and get back to sleep, albeit fruitlessly.

“-then you better get used to having to clean up all the messes that get made while your back is turned. I know playing with your new toy is much more interesting -”

“If I have to god damn ask you one more time to not talk about him like that, I'm going to pull the book. I swear to God, Lydia.” As for Stiles, he's learned to grin and bear Lydia's hostile tolerance of him with eyerolls and shots of tequila at parties. She's volatile and rude and kind of fucking annoying, yeah, but Stiles apparently just has more patience than Derek. Derek freaks out every time she says anything about Stiles that isn't an obvious and total compliment.

Those occasions, as you can imagine, are few and far between. Lydia and Derek argue more now than they ever did before, and Stiles feels wholly responsible, no matter what Derek says about it.

“I'm starting to get the sense that you would pull the god damn book for him,” Lydia is accusatory, caustic, acting like she doesn't know for a solid fact that Stiles is awake, and listening. “He could snap his fingers, and you'd throw your entire career away just because he asked you to.”

“You don't understand -”

“The fact that you're not even going to deny that you'd willingly lose millions of dollars just for some human who doesn't even understand what a mating bond is...”

Derek growls, low from the back of his throat, a particular kind of angry snarl that Stiles never, ever hears outside of these arguments with Lydia, even less so when Stiles himself isn't the subject of discussion. “I'm tired. I want to go to sleep. Stiles is waiting. I'm done talking to you about this.”

Heavy footfalls, followed by the clack of Lydia's heels going down the steps. “I just hope the vanilla, mediocre sex is worth it all to you, Derek.”

Right as that jolly little sentence is ending, Derek's form appears in the bedroom doorway, silhouetted by the lights in the hallway. Stiles sits up again, blinking steadily at him as Lydia's high heels click clack their way deeper into the house, vanishing until Stiles can't hear anymore and only assumes she's heading back to the garage to drive herself home.

There's quiet for a second, Stiles squinting at Derek, and Derek standing there. Knowing good and well Stiles just heard all of that, that he's heard variations of the same fight over and over again for the past two months since Beacons finally got a release date.

“Well,” Stiles prompts, voice raspy with sleep. “Is it?”

Derek huffs a laugh and steps into the room, closing the door behind him. He can see fine in the dark, and Stiles is half asleep anyway, so it doesn't matter to either of them when the hallway lights disappear. Shuffling, clothing unzipping, shoes plopping to the ground.

“I'll take that as a maybe,” Stiles pulls the sheets up higher on his chest, yawns, runs his hand through his hair. “You guys had fun at the office I guess.”

“Yeah,” the bed dips, and then there's warm fingers grabbing Stiles' ankle through the sheet. “You know how much I love the back room at Howl and Lydia's nails-on-a-chalkboard voice.”

For whatever reason, Lydia absolutely insists on attempting to run a successful and professional business out of the fucking back room at her BDSM club. Stiles could not make this up if he tried. He's been in that back room before – it's cold, it's small, and the bass makes the ceiling thump, Lydia's framed diplomas bouncing on the walls. Not to mention the fact that it vaguely smells like latex and bubblegum lube, which puts about a hundred images in Stiles' head that he can't shake out no matter how hard he tries.

The point is, Derek half lives in that back room with the bassline and the lube air freshener these days. Stiles doesn't understand how there could be so much work to be done when he's had his own hands on a finished and published copy of Beacons. The damn thing is done, cover art designed by blah, dedicated to blah, “best book I ever fuckin' read A+ would read again” - blah from Blah Magazine. Maybe he doesn't get the business or the industry much at all, and for all the ranting Derek does about all of it, he never gets into the real nuts and bolts of things.

Derek's hand runs up and along Stiles' chest, and then he's lying down right next to him, nuzzling his nose into Stiles' neck and breathing. “You should've gone home,” he murmurs.

Stiles makes a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat. “Your bed is more comfortable.” True.

“I'm serious,” he kisses Stiles' neck, his jaw. “I've done this to you too many times, now. You've got to stop waiting around for me. You shouldn't have to.”

There's a very long speech that Stiles has given Derek time and time again whenever he gets into these moods where he feels like the worst person alive (and since becoming official, Stiles has learned that those moods come around more often than either of them really feel comfortable acknowledging), that includes all kinds of lines like how much Derek means to him, how happy he is now, how he doesn't start hating Derek every time he's not some perfect angel boyfriend from heaven.

Tonight, however, he's too tired, and the sun is going to be coming up sooner than he wants it to. So, he wraps his fingers around Derek's face to pull it up to kiss him on the mouth, tangles his legs up with Derek's in the sheets. He hopes it translates the message loud and clear enough. If Derek's answering reply of resting his head on against Stiles' shoulder and curling tight around him like an octopus claiming a rock to sleep on is anything to go by, he'd say it translated just fine.

Things are just bad right now, Stiles thinks to himself as he falls asleep. They're stressful and bad and when the book finally just comes out and is done, they'll go back to how they were. It's fucking weird, because Stiles never thought he'd wish they could go back to being no-strings-attached again.

It all just felt a little bit easier back then, is the thing of it.

****

After the McDonald's debacle (the one that made front page news in the local Sunday paper – his father has the clipping hanging up on the fridge, and every time Stiles sees the picture of the McFlurry machine dashed to bits before pulling out the milk, he smirks to himself. He's still not embarrassed, honestly), nobody in town really wanted to hire him. He had to admit he worked at McDonald's, and all of them called up Finstock for a god damn recommendation, and – well. One can imagine that that did not go over well at fucking all.  
The words worst mistake I ever made had been used to describe Stiles to the manager at Ruby Tuesday, who gave Stiles a look like she just realized she had an escaped felon sitting in her office. Stiles felt like intervening from his spot in the chair across from her, saying he was the one who hired the kid who tried to use the grease in the fryer as a weapon against a woman claiming her fries weren't crispy enough, so, like, comparatively...Instead he sat there, and listened to his sixth straight rejection in a row.

Still worth it. He will never, never in his life, regret sending that McFlurry machine to a watery fucking grave.

All the same, nobody in town would hire him. Nobody in the food service industry, at least, so he had to start getting creative. Not having a job just doesn't compute for him in his mind – it doesn't work. Not making his own money and not being able to pay for his own gas? A non-option. Derek tried to butt in about a half dozen times saying he'd pay off Stiles' car payments, pay for Stiles' old student loans, pay for this and pay for that and Stiles nearly started punching him in the nose every time he opened his mouth.

It's one thing to buy Stiles nice dinners and a new watch just because he has the money to do so and likes doing shit like that. It's another for Stiles to become reliant on him for, like, living. That just wasn't going to happen. Stiles can buy his own Kraft macaroni and cheese and off brand condiments, fuck you very much.

Then Derek started offering to try and get Stiles a job underneath Lydia and the thought – the sheer idea of it. Of being underneath Lydia's thumb in all ways. Of having to do what she says. Of being in the BDSM office, of having to smell Chanel number five and listen to her classical playlist that drones on and water her plants and fetch her coffee like some kind of servant boy. He'd have sooner sawed off his own foot, fried it, and eaten it, bone and all, than been subjected to that kind of a hell on earth. He said as much, and Derek pursed his lips and sighed through his nose, but made no arguments. He fucking knows good and well. Lydia's the best, but she's also The Worst. No arguing that.

So, Stiles' only option was an out of town job. He pointedly left McDonald's off his resume, prayed that the McFlurry death announcement didn't cross county lines, and journeyed to the next town over (which, conveniently, was closer to Derek's house anyway.) It's a rinkydink little place near the edge of the preserve that has a single gas station, a coffee house, and a diner with a blinking sign that stays open twenty-four hours a day. Stiles spotted the hill that hides Derek's mansion in a sea of trees immediately behind the gas station and smirked to himself, hoping he'd get the job at the diner.

Not just because it would be close to Derek. But. It was a factor.

He wound up getting the job at the diner, much to Derek's half chagrin and half delight, and makes actual honest to God tips. It's not so bad. After a month and a half, he finally had enough in his savings to move out of his dad's place and get his own apartment (again, much to Derek's half chagrin and half delight.)

Chagrin, because Derek was under some bizarre impression that if Stiles were to ever move out he'd immediately be packing his bags and heading for Derek's dumbass mansion. As if Stiles has ever, ever been that type of person, first of all. And second of all, they've only been really dating for four months, only known each other for a little over five. It would be insane of Stiles to come bounding in with his suitcase and his messiness and his proclivity to leave wet towels on the floor in the bathroom when, really, they still sort of don't know each other all that well.

Derek just – doesn't see it that way. And Stiles tries to understand that for him, the relationship is different. It's just inherently different when Derek looks at it than when Stiles looks at it. Stiles loves Derek, cares about him, wants to spend time with him and be with him a lot, but he also looks at it all very logically. Derek doesn't.

And delight because finally there's a place that's far away from Lydia, security detail, public eyes, and Stiles' father where they can hang out. Granted, it's shitty and the best Stiles could do on his salary, but luckily, Derek isn't a judgmental rich person. He knows what it's like to not have money, and knows that Stiles doesn't have any, so he doesn't even make a face when Stiles explains that the stove only works if you kick it six times in just the right spot and that the shower head sometimes falls off and smacks Stiles in the forehead. He just laughs a little at the green colored stain on the bedroom ceiling that looks vaguely like the Virgin Mary every time he sees it, and helps Stiles open and close his rusty old windows with werewolf strength. The place has a certain charm. Right by the highway so the revving of motorcycle engines wakes Stiles up nearly every night, an upstairs neighbor who used to play in a garage band in the Good Old Days and is now hard of hearing and blasts C-Span at all hours of the day, and a possibly rabid pack of raccoons that arrange themselves into an attack formation every time Stiles brings his garbage out to the dumpster.

Either way, from how he's looking at it, his life is better now than it was. Before, he had no direction, no aim, was just wandering around and making money and hating every single fucking second of his pathetic little existence. He didn't know what he wanted to do. What he wanted to be. For a while there, it was really starting to feel like he wasn't ever going to be anything.

Which is fine. The thing nobody ever tells you in school is that most people wind up being nothing. There are somebodies, and there are nobodies, in a one to one million ratio respectively, and that's just how it is.

Now, Stiles is undeniably a somebody. Just – not in the way he always dreamed about it.

As Derek has told Stiles near a thousand times now, everything tends to get around.

The earth spins in a circle, all bad deeds come back around to bite you in the ass, and people talk. Throughout Stiles' life, his biggest claim to fame and notoriety was being the Sheriff's son. People, mainly the cool kids, didn't want to hang around with him because they wanted to have parties and get drunk, and because someone started the rumor that Stiles was a huge, unforgiving nark, he didn't really get invited to stuff much. Nevermind the fact that Stiles has literally never, never once, walked right up to his dad like a brown noser and told him about some seventeen year olds getting beer under the table from college kids to host high school parties.

A lot of kids disliked him and gave him dirty looks, back then. He always kind of thought high school was the worst his reputation could ever get.

Really, he had no fucking idea what real gossip looks like. High school drama, it turns out, though it seemed to be the end of the world that he wasn't getting drunk all the time back then, is fucking crayons and sand boxes compared to what he deals with now.

“They talk about me like I put a curse on you or something,” Stiles snarls from the passenger seat of the Rover one afternoon, glaring out at the crowd of people they just navigated their way through in the middle of a busy intersection in Bullshit, California. “Like I hexed you to like me!”

Derek gets the same look on his face he always gets whenever Stiles starts ranting about the things people say about him – an apologetic grimace, followed up by a slight knowing smile that comes with years of experiencing the same thing over and over. And over. And over. “Most of those girls,” he says, inching forward foot by foot while security tries (and mostly fails) to get the hoards of 'fans' out from the front of the car, “genuinely believe that you did, Stiles.”

Stiles snorts and glares. Glares. At every single teenage girl he can set his eyes on through the tinted windows. This is something that Lydia Martin will smack him over the head with a rolled up newspaper for tomorrow (god would it absolutely fucking kill you to put on a smile, Stiles, would it murder you? Would you die? People would like you a lot more if you did!), but right now, Stiles doesn't care. How he hates Derek's fans sometimes, how he fucking wishes Derek was just another person, sometimes. “They hate me.”

“Oh, sure.” Derek doesn't even try denying it. What's the point? Ten seconds on twitter or tumblr would tell him exactly the same. “Not all of them, though.”

“Don't,” Stiles moans, slapping his hands over his face as Derek finally breaks through the crowd to move slightly faster than a crawl. “Don't. Bring that up.”

Apparently, simply getting his picture taken and having his face splashed across tabloids and having his own personal hashtag on twitter is grounds enough to become famous, and becoming famous means getting a fanbase, and getting a fanbase means – well. People sit around on the internet and freak out over blurry pictures of you buying tomatoes from the Farmer's Market and come up with theories as to why you did this, why you did that, why you're talking to them, where's Derek, how come Derek wasn't there and on and on and on. Stiles guesses that it's fairly innocuous, but he's a masochist, and can't help searching his name on twitter and tumblr sometimes just to see what kind of shit comes up.

It's a third mean, a third hilarious, and a third scary. Equal parts of each to create a cocktail that Stiles for some reason cannot stop trying. Every time Derek comes out of the shower in the morning to find Stiles on Derek's iPad, scrolling through his tag on tumblr, he smacks the thing out of Stiles' hands and growls something about putting parental controls on there just so Stiles can't do that anymore.

“I don't get why,” Stiles will say, watching Derek paw around in his closet for something to wear. When Lydia isn't around, he has a harder time getting himself put together. “I think it's funny.”

“You think it's funny until you don't anymore,” Derek always says back hotly, giving Stiles a very knowing look. “I don't want to listen to another hour long rant about how you and Scott aren't fucking each other behind my back, all right?”

That's the worst of the rumors, by and large. Maybe it's Stiles' fault for flat out refusing to not hang out with Scott in spite of Lydia's insistence that he pull back at least a little bit, but fuck everyone. As if Stiles is a cheater, has ever been, and as if Scott would ever willingly participate, and as if Stiles could ever have sex with his best friend? Oh, the thought makes him so god damn mad. People shipping him with his best friend. As if he's not – oh, don't fucking get him going.

Stiles' whole point, however, is that in the blink of an eye, his life did a 180 degree turn around, going from shitty, awful, sad, lonely to – well. Honestly, Stiles doesn't have the adjectives to properly describe what his life is now. It's exciting to have his own apartment, and it's exciting to have a good job with a nice boss and decent clientele, and he has Derek, and Scott, and that's all good.

But there's always another side to every single card life deals out to you. His apartment sucks, and his job is far enough away that it eats up money in the form of gas, and Scott finally got up the balls to ask Allison the beta out on a date and he's preoccupied more often than he has time for Stiles anymore, and Derek...

Is amazing. Hanging out with Derek is always fun, getting texts from Derek while they're both separated by work is the highlight of his day, coming home to find Derek already in his living room with take-out and a Netflix movie waiting to play is perfect, and Derek is perfect. There's nothing, not a single thing, that Stiles can complain about in regards to Derek.

Sometimes he just gets overwhelmed by the strings attached to him. His life isn't the same anymore, not one bit, and that's entirely because he met Derek. The reason he hears girls whispering and the click of phone cameras going off when he's just trying to pump his damn gas is because of Derek, and the reason people talk about him like he's not a real person with a real life is because of Derek, and the reason that Lydia Martin hates him is because of Derek, and – Stiles wouldn't change any of it, not for the world.

But it's hard. He can't talk to Derek about it, not really, because Derek would feel guilty and awful, and Derek already feels guilty and awful nearly ninety-nine percent of the time, and Stiles just can't put that on him. Stiles never says no to going with Derek to a public event, even when he feels like hiding underneath his bed instead, just because he doesn't want Derek to know.

Repressing emotions isn't ever a good idea. Derek gets to get away with it because he pours it all into his work in therapy sessions locked away in his study, but Stiles isn't a creative person. He's just not sure what to do about it, except grin and bear it.

****

 _The worst thing about notoriety is that people know shit about you that you'd really rather like to keep to your fucking self until you deem someone worthy of having that information. Just for example, I don't particularly relish or love the fact that everyone knows my family all burned alive when I was sixteen years old and I was the one who welcomed the woman that did it into my parents' home in the first place. So, no. It's not my favorite thing that I get asked about that in interviews like it's some interesting facet of my personality instead of something painful and private. It's a ghost in my attic, a monster underneath my bed, and people just love dragging it out like it's a toy, instead. They do the same thing to him, now; treat him like he's some accessory I bought at the mall, some little pet I carry around for the shit of it. I never gave much thought to the way werewolves talk about humans like they're so fragile and stupid and idiotic, until I had to listen to them say that shit about him. As if he's a joke to them, or something. (Beacons, Derek Hale pg. 401)_  
****

“Drink this.” Derek holds a flute of wolfsbane champagne in front of Stiles' face, a frown deep set on his mouth, and Stiles swallows.  
“Because I'm nervous,” Stiles guesses, taking the glass from his fingers and sniffing at the liquid conspicuously. Most times, Derek doesn't let Stiles drink the stuff because humans go about fifty times more nutty than wolves do, but there's always a special occasion for every thing.

“Because this is a terrible, shitty place, and the more alcohol you have in your system, the more you'll be able to tolerate it.”

“Gee,” Stiles mutters, grimacing at the rubbing alcohol scent wafting from the glass. “You're really calming me down here, Derek. This confidence booster is making me feel like I could take on the world. Thanks. Thanks for that.”

“I'm not going to lie to you,” Derek smiles at him, taking a seat on the coffee table in front of where Stiles is sitting on the couch, cocking his head to the side to appraise him for a moment. “I hate this shit, and I hate that I have to do it.” He pauses, giving Stiles an even more critical look. “I really hate that I couldn't get you out of it.”

Stiles tips the glass back, downing it in one go. He scrunches his face up and makes a noise like he hated every second of it, but has half a mind to ask for another. “That's what you get for writing me in at the last second.” Stiles remembers pretty vividly Derek sharing the last hundred pages of the Beacons manuscript with him, looking nervous and twitchy – two things that Derek does not normally look. He had slid the pages across his dining room table, looked away with his arms crossed over his chest, and explained that his publishers thought Stiles was going to keep Derek's sales up. Beacons is his fourth book, and usually by that time in anyone's career, you either go up in sales, or you go down.

Derek had insisted that Stiles could say no, if he wanted. If he didn't like what Derek said about him, or if he didn't feel comfortable with any of it. The amazing part is that Derek never, never once in the entire hundred pages that Stiles comes up in on and off, wrote Stiles' name out.

Everyone just knows. When the book finally comes out in two weeks, no one is going to have to wonder who Derek is referring to, name given or not. The thought both fascinated and scared the shit out of Stiles, but not particularly in a bad way. Nothing Derek said in there was bad, or at least nothing he said directly about Stiles was bad.

It was just insane to read the things about Stiles that Derek thinks but doesn't articulate out loud. There are a dozen passages of emotions Derek wrote about Stiles that Stiles never even guessed at, read with raised eyebrows and a confused twist to his mouth. The only thing that bothered him was that Derek is much more forthcoming on paper than he ever is in person, which...that's an introverted writer, and Stiles gets it.

All the same, Stiles green lit it, and now here he is in a dressing room with make up caked onto his face, because they're using him as a selling point like they have been since the beginning. The cool part is Stiles gets a cut of the action (read as : money) this time. He's getting paid to sit in a chair on a talk show, drink water out of a coffee mug, and laugh at lame jokes for the camera. It's cake.

The look Derek gives him is half amused, and half not. “I know they treat you like a prop,” he begins, and Stiles very nearly puts up his hand to stop him, because he's heard it before. “But you know if you're uncomfortable, you can get up and walk out and they can't do anything about it.”

They can hold Derek accountable and give him the verbal lashing of his life, but he's not wrong about that, technically. Stiles isn't under any contract to do any of this. He's just been roped in for the fucking ride.

Stiles shakes his head, putting the empty glass down beside Derek's leg on the coffee table. “I'll make it out alive, I think.”

Derek holds his eye contact for a few seconds longer, before running his fingers across Stiles' jawline and neck in quick sweeping motions, more perfunctory than anything else. At this stage in their relationship, when they sleep coiled up against one another more often than they sleep alone, share shampoo and body wash and share the same space half of their time, Stiles must be so immersed in Derek's scent that a skunk couldn't even really cover it up if it tried. From Stiles' skin to his clothes to his hair, he must reek like Derek, and vice versa. So the scent marking thing isn't really necessary, but Derek still does it every single day, several times a day.

Whether it's just old habit, or whether it's something else entirely, Stiles never asks. It's not like he minds Derek touching him, at all.

The ground rules for Stiles being shoved out in front of a live studio audience with four cameras focusing in on different angles of his body and face were actually pretty simple – Lydia was supposed to give him a crash course in how not to bungle everything and send Derek into bankruptcy, but that mostly consisted of her looking at him with a narrowed eye and saying “this is a horrible idea.” In spite of the fact that it was partially Lydia's idea to begin with. But, Derek took the reins, and explained to Stiles that all he had to do was follow Derek's lead and not make one of his inappropriate and awkward jokes. It sounded easy. So, all he had to do was keep his mouth shut unless being asked a direct question? Easy as pie.

Stiles had thought he had been in front of crowds before, when walking out of restaurants in Hollywood with Derek, when attending one of Derek's parties, when being lead by the hand through Howl with his eyes downcast. He thought that a crowd is a crowd is a crowd, and he thought that he had gotten, like, used to it. As it turns out, he hadn't gotten used to it.

The second he steps outside onto the stage behind Derek and lifts his eyes to the studio in front of him, the sea of people, the cameras, the glistening floors and the high ceilings and the lights and the screaming, it's all he can do to put a shell shocked smile on his face and fit his eyes directly onto Derek's back. It's the weirdest thing – he nearly blacks out in surprise or nerves or anxiety as they finish the walk, as he shakes the interviewer's hand, and only comes back to when he's sitting down on the padded chair and Derek starts laughing. Whether at something the interviewer said, something he himself said, Stiles isn't sure. He swallows, can't help but watch out of the corner of his eyes as a camera zooms in on the side of his face, and wipes his sweaty palms on his pants.

He's reminded, masochistically, that over half of the people in this room do not like him. He has a split second thought of launching up out of his seat and making a break for it – just fucking charging up the steps through the crowd and out of the studio, maybe picking up his chair and launching it at one of the cameras just for the shit of it – and he can't really cuss out why. His negative reaction to this shit is instantaneous.

He does not like this. At all. He's never thought of himself as shy or introverted or uncomfortable under people's gazes, but most of the eyes that are on him feel...hostile. Like no one really wants him here.

“The book comes out in a week and a half, now!” Lacy, or Stacy, or Tracy, or whatever the fuck her name is, is holding up a shiny, brand spanking new copy of Beacons in her manicured hands, grinning from ear to ear as the crowd goes apeshit at the sight of it. It's the first time that the cover art has been revealed to the general public. It's a big deal. Stiles still has that same wide eyed smile on his face. “And how long were you working on it? How long does it take to put together an entire book?”

Stiles knows Derek has answered this exact question, give or take, a million times, now. He was asked when From the Ashes came out and became a world wide phenomenon and he was baby-faced on camera with a genuine smile and a shy look in his eyes, and he was asked when Reborn came out when he was going through his New York street tough phase and gave everyone dirty looks, and he was asked when Back to the Flames came out and he was sullen and withdrawn and answered all his interview questions like the person talking to him was practically pulling teeth. His answer has always been the same, in variations.

Uh. You know, it kinda depends? I used to write little novellas when I was growing up. I had this huge collection of things I'd written that uh – no one was allowed to look at, and those all burned up in the fire – audience aaw'ing – and some of those took longer to write even though they were shorter. I mean, I don't know. It depends.

It takes however long it takes. I don't fucking rush anything.

Writing is different every time.

Now, he smiles, his full set of teeth out on display, and gives Stiles a quick glance over, as if making sure he's still sitting there next to him. “This was initially supposed to take me eight months to write – I had a deadline, and I was supposed to stick to it. Moving back to my hometown didn't even really slow me down, it sped me up. I was on track to finish in five months, earlier than I've ever gotten anything done, but then...” he rubs his jaw, somewhat shyly, and flicks his eyes back over to Stiles, just briefly. Not brief enough that the camera and the people watching them don't catch it. “I got distracted. I finished late.”

Taking the bait, Tracy/Stacy/Lacy taps her fingers against the cover of the book, smiling at them both, before settling her eyes right on Stiles like a hawk finding its prey in the desert. “You pushed back the release date to write about Stiles.” Stiles' cheeks heat up, and he looks away, ducking his head and lowering his eyes. “Is that right?”

Derek's fingers brush up against Stiles' where they're sharing an arm rest, maybe placating him if he can tell that Stiles is about to up in flames in embarrassment right about now, and then he takes in a deep breath. “You know – my first three books deal with the aftermath of a really terrible thing that happened in my life. I could probably write another fifty books about what it's like to live with what happened, and for a while there, it seemed like that's exactly what I was going to wind up doing. Wandering around in the dark, so to speak.”

A glance out at the audience accompanied by the dead quiet silence lets Stiles and everyone else know that the entire room is hanging onto Derek's every fucking word. They think he's a genius – and Stiles, he can't exactly disagree. It's just weird to share that sentiment with an entire room filled with people, as opposed to alone with Derek in his bed.

“...Beacons is just different. I didn't know it at the time, it didn't even have a title, and it was just another three hundred pages of the same things, and I knew my publishers were going to love it, and people would buy it. Things sort of changed, last minute. Right before I was set to send off the manuscript -” he doesn't finish the sentence, lets it hang there in the silence, and Stiles meets his eyes dead on. He doesn't say anything, honestly doesn't know if he could, but Derek smiles at him so fucking genuinely, in front of all these people, like he doesn't give a fuck if the entire world knows exactly how he feels, and for just a second, Stiles forgets they're even there.

Stiles hates the crowd, hates that Derek is constantly surrounded by one. But he loves the warmth of the limelight that Derek just exudes by existing at all.

“Your first three books,” Lacy interrupts, forcing the dead air to clear so the show can keep rolling before Stiles and Derek wind up making out on camera or something. “...the motif is pretty crystal clear. From the Ashes, Reborn as like a phoenix, and Back to the Flames – then Beacons. It doesn't really seem to fit.”

Derek nods his head in agreement, finally breaking Stiles' eye contact. “It's not meant to fit. It's not a new chapter, it's a new fucking library.” Stiles hopes that the man in charge of bleeping out curse words isn't losing his job, right about now.

“And Stiles,” he's addressed directly for the first time since this whole thing started, and when all eyes land on him this time, he just squeezes Derek's hand and squares his shoulders. He can act like this doesn't bother him. Derek can do it, and Derek's here. He'll be okay. “...how does it feel to know that millions upon millions of people are going to read intimate, private details about your life with Derek?”

Stiles nearly laughs. There's nothing too intimate in Beacons about Stiles. There are some pretty brief, inexplicit but steamy nonetheless, passages about he and Derek fucking, and some extrapolations about mole placement on Stiles' back and bare thighs, but otherwise, every thing in there is mostly just Derek's inner monologue. Stiles loves that Derek is a writer and can make every thing more poetic than it really fucking is, but really, until you're a subject and reading three solid pages about the way your wave your hands around when you're talking, you just don't know how extra some writers can fucking be. And Derek is the most extra of them all. It's half his appeal, Stiles guesses.

“It doesn't bother me,” Stiles says with a shrug, going for nonchalant and feeling like he's doing it pretty well. “I knew what I was getting into. Besides – everyone wants Derek Hale to write about them, right?”

Outside in the limousine, Derek nearly brains himself in his efforts to slam his hand on the button for the partition, while their driver, Jeeves (which isn't his real name, but Stiles insists on fucking calling him that, much to Derek's obvious chagrin and Jeeves' narrow eyed looks) gives them a dirty look in the rearview mirror before his eyes vanish behind the black divide, and it's just them in the back. The number of times that Stiles and Derek have screwed around back here is incalculable, and it's just a good thing that Jeeves has a radio that he can blast at top volume.

The car starts moving, as smooth a ride as ever, and since Stiles is just kneeling down on the carpeting at the moment, he falls forwards a bit and smacks the side of his head into some of the cushioning. Derek grabs his hips and starts trying to right him – Stiles is moving like he's going to climb up on top of the seat and actually sit down, at some point, but Derek puts a stop to that right quick with his fingers pinching into the skin around his hipbones.

He arranges Stiles so he's leaning forwards over the seat, his forehead resting against the leather and his palms holding him up, as Derek's fingers work open his belt, slide underneath the waistband of his pants, dip along his briefs until he can slide them both down Stiles' hips in one fell swoop. Leaving them bunched up around Stiles' knees, Derek wraps his hand around the front of Stiles' neck and pulls him up until Stiles' back is flush against Derek's chest – if they weren't both still wearing their shirts, Stiles in a neat button down and Derek in a v-neck, they'd be skin to skin.

Derek's fingers wrap around Stiles' dick, and at the first pump of his hand, Stiles is dropping his head back to rest on a broad shoulder and letting out a breathy moan. At that exact moment, Jeeves cranks up the radio to its highest setting, the bassline thumping underneath Stiles and Derek's knees. Over the sound of whatever top 40 song that even fucking is, Derek mouths at Stiles' ear, keeping up a steady pace, to say, “you were so perfect.”

Delirious underneath Derek's touch, Stiles just nods. Yeah, yeah he was perfect. Sure.

“I wanted you so much,” Derek bites Stiles' ear lobe gently, but just hard enough that Stiles can feel the tiniest hint of pain there behind the softness. “The whole time, all I could think about...”

It feels a little counterproductive when Derek takes his hand off of Stiles, and Stiles is about to complain about it in a big fucking way – when Derek pushes him forward by his shoulders until he's bent over, his forehead resting up against the leather of the seats again. Big hands start kneading hard enough to leave red marks on the pale of his skin, and it feels like it goes on forever that the only thing Stiles can feel is Derek gently bruising him to claim him. Things like that, like Derek sucking marks into Stiles' neck or rubbing his scent into Stiles' skin, or gently working a purple bruise into Stiles' thighs or somewhere more intimate – Stiles has always liked that.

He does like the idea that Stiles can be completely and totally Derek's. Not anyone else's.

Finally, satisfied with his work, Derek adjusts Stiles' hips and spreads his knees out wider, using his fingers to do the same to Stiles' cheeks until he can feel cool air from the air conditioning against one of the warmest parts of his body. “I think about you like this all the time,” Derek nearly hisses, and Stiles wants to say I read the fucking book, I know what you think about me, but it's all he can do to bite his lip and burrow his face deeper into the cushioning.

The first gentle lick of Derek's tongue against Stiles' entrance has him shuddering and digging his fingers deeper into the upholstery, leaking precome onto the fine leather and his own stomach and breathing deeply in and out. “Fuck,” he whines when Derek pushes his tongue inside, and has to physically fight the urge to push back into it. “Jesus Christ.”

Derek hmm's, and makes a point out of gathering Stiles hands by his wrists into one of his own, pinning them down and holding them steady. Stiles has sort of an issue with moving his hands around all the time, trying to claw at Derek and pull at his hair and jerk himself off – Derek wrote about all of that in his book, remember? The problem is, Derek knows good and well how long it could take to get Stiles off from just this, and sometimes, he can't. Sometimes all it does is turn Stiles into a literal whimpering, simpering mess, which Stiles has started to suspect is Derek's personal favorite thing on the face of the planet.

And, why not? He's the alpha, after all.

Five minutes in, the bass from the radio still booming all around them, Derek's index finger spreading Stiles open for more torment, and Stiles hiccups. He lifts his forehead as much as he can, still breathing wet and thick against the leather until it fogs up against his cheek, and says, “I love you.”

Derek and he have said the same to each other enough times by now that it shouldn't be surprising or startling, but Derek pulls his mouth off of Stiles quickly and reaches up to tilt his head to the side, to get a better look at his face. “You know I love you,” he says back.

“Yeah,” Stiles agrees in a rasp, blinking steadily at Derek's face with what he can see with only one eye. “I just – I love you a lot.”

It's true. It's irrefutably true that Stiles loves Derek, so fucking much sometimes he doesn't even know what to do with it. Stiles is jealous that Derek can write, that he has someplace to put his feelings down, to let them all out and free and make something out of them. Stiles sometimes can only just feel it, like an ache, and he wishes he could push it out and make art.

That's part of why he loves Derek, so much. He's this artistic and smart and incredible person, and for some reason, for whatever insane nonsensical reason, the universe decided to make Stiles the person who gets the words that Derek weaves out of his fingers.

When Derek touches him, he swears it feels like braille being written against his skin.

****

_I have dreams about his neck, his fingers, his eyelashes, his skin. I think it's bizarre, because I never used to dream about anyone else before him. I never used to dream about much at all, except for fire, and darkness, and embers climbing their way up into the sky. I think I had one last nightmare, the first night he slept in my bed right there next to me, his breathing the only thing I could hear over the sound of the blood rushing in my ears. It was the same as always, the same dream I've been having since I was sixteen, where my house is on fire and I'm just a kid and I keep trying to draw water up from the well, but no matter how many times I pull the bucket out, no matter how deep I dip it, it comes out empty, and people are dying as I try again and again. It feels like my fault. It was._

  
_That dream used to always end with my hands chapped and burning from the rope, and the house in ashes beside me, and I would wake up in a sweat and feel the phantom hurt of blisters on my palms that weren't really there. This time, there was this blinding yellow glow, like a spotlight, or a flashlight, searching in the night, and it was so bright that I couldn't see the orange glow of the flames anymore. Like they just weren't there._

_I haven't had that nightmare, not ever again. I just dream about him. (Beacons, Derek Hale pg. 440)_

****

Beacons comes out on a warm September day, and there's a midnight release party that Stiles is of course dragged along to. Not because he was invited, because Lydia Martin made the fucking guest list and of course mailing Stiles an invitation would be like giving the stamp of approval on this whole shenanigan to begin with in her eyes. So he comes along as Derek's plus one, and he nearly can't believe how many people are there. There are two tiers to the entire affair, on two floors.  
The top floor overlooks the bottom floor, sectioned off by wrought iron black railings that guests can look down over if they so choose, and consists entirely of important people. So, Derek Hale for starters. Followed by people from all levels of Derek's publishing company, including a star struck looking intern who keeps shooting Derek wide-eyed glances like she's going to faint at any second. Derek's editors, who look very prim and annoyed at the noise levels, Lydia and her boyfriend, a host of other rich authors Derek's met in his travels, and – Stiles. Pretty much, that's it. They're all milling around up here with the caviar and the mood lighting and the music and the alcohol, and Stiles is drinking way more than he should be.

The bottom floor is fans. Diehards who scrimped and saved to be here in Derek Hale's ethereal presence, to get a copy of the new book signed by him, maybe even get a picture. Stiles doesn't know where he's supposed to go during that whole shebang, but he's already camped out at the food table and he has no plans of leaving any time soon.

Derek took him around and introduced him to everyone already, and Stiles' face hurts from smiling so much; he wasn't entirely broken apart when Lydia gave Stiles a dirty look before pointedly telling Derek that he should go and talk with whatshername from publishing for a minute, in a voice that said clear as bell that Stiles was not invited to this impromptu business meeting. Derek gave him an apologetic kiss on the cheek, told him to eat more and drink less, and left him in the exact spot he's in now.

Most people are avoiding him, it seems like. Either because they just don't want to talk to him, or they're afraid of what Derek the alpha werewolf is going to do if anyone tries to get too close to his mate. Stiles doesn't mind. More food for him.

Don't get Stiles wrong – he loves the party, he likes being here, and he's so proud of Derek and is happy to support him. But, Jesus Christ, these parties of his are always so awful, and Derek knows that good and well. It's just part of the job.

About halfway through his sixth or seventh chocolate covered strawberry, Lydia comes click clacking over to him with a bit of a vengeful glint in her eyes. Stiles would be alarmed and nervous, but that's essentially the way she always looks at him no matter what he has or hasn't done, so he just drops his strawberry stems into the trash and hunts for something else to munch on.

“Stiles,” she greets coldly, snapping her fingers in his face when he doesn't immediately look at her right away. “Should I put on my strawberry costume to get your attention?”

With a huff of breath, Stiles lifts his eyes and pointedly looks at Lydia with a frown. “What's up?”

She runs her hands down her dress. “I just thought you should know Derek is going to be very busy tonight. He doesn't have much time to entertain you.”

Like Stiles is some little kid that Derek's just brought along for show, she says this. “I figured that,” Stiles says evenly, not wanting to start another fucking argument with Lydia in a public place. “It's a big night.”

Lydia's eyes flash just briefly, with something Stiles can't identify, and then she's taking another step or two into Stiles' personal space. “He doesn't need you to distract him.”

“I'm not an idiot,” Stiles hisses.

Lydia mutters could've fooled me under her breath, and that does it.

Lowering his voice so no one else can hear, except maybe a werewolf who were pointedly listening in, Stiles decides he's had it just about the fuck enough with this shit. “Why don't you like me? Like, at all,” he asks, narrowing his eyes. “When you and I first met, you weren't like this towards me.”

She snorts. “When you and I first met, you worked at McDonald's and sucked Derek off every now and then. I thought you were a phase.”

Honestly, Stiles had thought the same thing, back then. He thought there would come a day when he wouldn't ever see Derek again, except for in magazines and from a distance. The difference between what he and Lydia thought is that Stiles always hoped that that wouldn't happen, and Lydia was betting and banking that it would. “Well,” Stiles gestures to himself, then the room at large, in a I'm still fucking here, asshole way. “Obviously not. I'm here, and probably will be for a while, so I don't get why now, I'm some thorn in your side.”

Another step closer to him, until Lydia has to tilt her chin up to look him directly in the face, and the look she gives him could probably strip paint off of the side of a house. “You're a human. Humans are good for sex and for fun and for playing around with,” Stiles honest to god shudders to fucking think of the ways Lydia plays around with humans, “...not for mating.”

“And yet, he's mated me.”

Lydia's lips curl in disgust and she makes a tch sound. “He's made a mistake is what he's gone and done.”

Stiles feels about ready to storm off in a huff, or throw a drink in her face, but instead, he stands his ground and shakes his head. “That's some fuck of an accusation to make. What makes you think that I'm just not good enough for him?”

“Because you don't get it,” she snaps. “You don't get what it even fucking means what Derek's done with you, the kind of connection he's made. You can't reciprocate it, it's not how you're built.”

“I love him.” It's the best argument Stiles has, and he raises his chin in the air defiantly as he says it. “Is that not enough?”

“You do,” she agrees. “Are you still going to in fifteen years?”

Stiles doesn't know what to say to that, so he opens his mouth, but no sound comes out. The truth is – he doesn't know. Nobody ever knows the fucking answer to that question, and how could they? This must have been exactly the reaction that Lydia had been hoping for, because a smug grin crosses her face and she shakes her head in disappointment from side to side.

“Derek is going to love you straight down until the day he dies, would swear that up and down, and all you can do is stand there gaping like a fish out of water,” she shakes her head again, and Stiles feels ashamed, for some reason. Even though that's not his fault. “He's going to love you, and when you decide you're sick of him, and his life, you're going to want to leave, and he'll have no choice but to follow. Throw his entire fucking life away, for a silly little human who can't even reciprocate a fucking mating bond. Every thing that we've worked so hard for -”

“All you care about is the money, and the books,” Stiles interrupts in a rasp, feeling shocky and shaky, “I don't think you care about Derek at all.”

She clucks her tongue, and without asking, she's runs her hands all up and down the silk shirt that Stiles is wearing. The one that she knows good and well Derek's money paid for, and Stiles knows she's making a point, right now. “Oh, honey.” She reaches up to pat his face, hard enough that it's almost like a slap. “Derek's best interests are always what I have in mind. It's in his best interest to put out books and keep making money, and I can tell you'll ruin that.” She lets go of his face and steps away, rolling her eyes. “Humans ruin everything.”

Stiles stares after her as she goes, hand shaking around the glass in his hand, and tries not to take anything she said to heart. It's hard, though, because loathe as Stiles is to admit it...he doesn't know anything about werewolf mates aside from the brief amount of research he's done and what Derek himself has told him. Derek has articulated time and time again that it means that he's going to love Stiles forever, that Stiles is it for him, and in the abstract, that always appeals to Stiles.

In the concrete, when Lydia is saying things like what about in fifteen years, what about tomorrow, what about reason and logic and humanity, it feels...scary. At the moment, Stiles does want to be with Derek forever. He knows that, and he tries to shake off every thing that Lydia made him feel and remind himself of how much Derek means to him.

It's hard for Stiles to imagine ever not loving Derek, honestly. He can't imagine doing anything else but being with him. It's just complicated to know that for Stiles, it's not as black and white as it is for Derek. He wishes it was, does he fucking ever, but he's not like that. Lydia was right about that, at least, and Stiles has known that. Derek and Stiles view this differently.

But that doesn't instantaneously mean every thing is just going to go down in flames and awfulness, does it? Stiles thinks not.

He hopes not.

When the night is winding down, Stiles hasn't even caught a glimpse of Derek in about two hours. He's eaten so many orderves he thinks he's going to wake up in the morning just as a pig in a blanket, but luckily he switched over to water halfway through the night. So, now, he's just tired, and his feet hurt, and he wants to climb into bed with Derek and sleep for the next week and a half.

He's standing in front of a big blow up picture of Beacons' cover art, Derek's name emblazoned in yellow, Beacons in a holographic silver. The picture is of a coast, somewhere, probably fictional and just photoshopped by whoever the Hell it was who made it, and there are lighthouses. Ten of them, maybe, in the forefront, and then more that drift off into the background, blurry and unfocused. They all have lights shining bright, but one in the middle is brighter then the rest, its light pointed directly at the viewer in a way that suggests that if you were looking at this in real life, you might go blind from the strength of it.

Right as Stiles is about to hobble off to the lobby to find a bench to sleep on, he spots Derek more or less fighting his way through the crowd, calling Stiles' name. Stiles perks up, watching as the crowd parts for Derek slowly and he makes his way over to the corner Stiles has staked his claim on. When he finally bursts out, he reaches his hands out for Stiles and wraps him up into a hug, nearly crushing Stiles up against him.

“I'm sorry,” he starts off with, and Stiles is about to say don't worry, I knew you'd be busy, I had lots of good food, but then Derek continues. “I have to leave, I'm sorry.”

Stiles stiffens, confused. “Leave? Where?”

He puffs out a breath against Stiles' neck. “The tour.”

Stiles pulls back a little. “You said the tour doesn't start for a few days.” Stiles had been looking forward to spending the last couple of days Derek has before the media storm and mall tour and the signings all start up, because Stiles isn't allowed to come along on that. It makes sense, in a way, Stiles guesses; he'd just be a liability or something in the long run. He had accepted that Derek was going to be going away for a month or so, but just...not now?

Derek tries to hold on to Stiles a little tighter, like he thinks the more he says, the madder Stiles will be, and the more he'll pull away. “Lydia booked more at the last second,” of fucking course she did. “I have to be in New York by tomorrow morning at six am.”

It's nearly midnight now, and that's California time. Derek is already running late. When Stiles looks up, he spots Lydia standing with her arms crossed over her chest, tapping one foot in annoyance, her purse slung over her shoulder. Waiting for Derek to hurry it up.

“I don't want to go,” Derek says into Stiles' ear. At this point, Stiles is like a rag doll in Derek's arms, too upset, startled, sad to really do anything. “Not without you.”

Stiles swallows, his adam's apple bobbing against Derek's shoulder where his chin is currently perched, and he knows he has power, in this moment. He could tell Derek not to go, to stay, to fuck all those people, his book will still sell okay without any press or signings or whatever the hell. And Derek would stay. Like Stiles has said before, Derek has a curious issue with saying no to Stiles on most things, and this wouldn't be an exception. Even if Lydia's head exploded, even if he lost out on x amount of money, he would do it because Stiles asked him to.

And Stiles can't do that. He just can't. “You've gotta go,” he says, his voice tight. “It's gonna be great.”

“It's going to be horrific,” Derek contends, finally pulling away just slightly so he can look Stiles right in the face. He's frowning, and Stiles knows he looks like he's about to start crying and Derek can tell, so it's not a surprise when Derek cups Stiles' jaw gently and strokes his thumb along Stiles' cheek. “I'd rather be with you. You know that, right?”

Stiles nods.

“No amount of money, no nothing – it doesn't compete, not with you.”

“You're gonna be late if you don't hurry,” Stiles plays with the lapels of Derek's jacket, clearing his throat and blinking to keep the tears out of his eyes. “And I want my phone call from the airport saying you've landed.”

Derek kisses Stiles, right there in front of everyone. There'll be pictures of it tomorrow, but Stiles doesn't care, and he doubts Derek does either. Derek always makes him feel like they're the only two people in the entire room, like every single thing he's written, even from years before they even met, was written just for him.

When they pull apart, Derek juts his chin in the direction of the cover still hanging behind Stiles' head, and he says, “that's you, you know.”

Stiles turns, and traces his eyes along the brightest light from the tallest lighthouse. He doesn't know what to say, doesn't think he could get his vocal chords working, so he just thinks about how every single time someone will slide a book across the table for Derek to sign, Derek's eyes will sweep over that lighthouse, and he'll think of Stiles. It's comforting.

“I'll call.” Derek promises, pressing another kiss to Stiles' mouth. “I'll be coming back to California in a month, okay? Exactly a month, to the day. That's not that long.”

It feels like a century, but Stiles nods his head in agreement, forcing a smile onto his face. “You'll sell out,” he tells Derek, accepting a kiss to the cheek. “Lines out the door and all.”

Derek swipes his fingers along Stiles' neck and jaw, the last time he'll be able to do it for a good long while, and says, “I'm taking some of your clothes with me. The hoodie.”

“That's fine,” Stiles says, and Derek is already pulling back, Lydia's foot tapping becoming more annoyed and more insistent. “You've gotta go.”

Like it physically pains him to do so, Derek lets go of Stiles' shoulders, and start backing away from him. Stiles stands there, thinking he's going to have to drive Derek's car home – not home, back to Derek's, where his own car is parked and waiting for him in the driveway with an overnight bag, because he thought... - and then he's going to have to back to his apartment and sleep in his bed all by himself.

“I'll call,” Derek says again, more solemn.

****

“For fuck's sake,” Stiles hisses, recoiling his hand away from the coffee Erica plopped down on the counter for him to take. “What is this, two hundred fucking degrees?”  
Erica gives him a dark look before sliding a sleeve along next to it. “I'm still learning to use the steamer, okay asshole?”

Stiles wonders how hard it could possibly be – put milk in metal thing, watch as temperature rises, remove before it gets too hot – but, then again, maybe he shouldn't judge. When the two of them worked at McDonald's it took him a solid month to learn how to use the registers even remotely well over there. Theirs was still using the old fashioned pictures of food type of registers instead of the new touch screen ones, so there was a lot of suffering to be endured.

He slides the sleeve onto his drink and pilfers a straw as well, figuring it's still too hot to even sip at currently. “I can't believe they actually hired you here,” he scans the nice looking menus, the fresh swept floors, the hip clientele scattered around the place. “You fibbed on your resume, didn't you?”

Erica casually flips her hair over her shoulder and shrugs, scratching at a patch of dried mocha chocolate on her upper arm with a pink fingernail. “I might have made the McCafe sound more advanced than it was.”

“Right,” Stiles nods, rolling his eyes. No wonder she actually managed to get a job within city limits while Stiles was actually and literally banished to the woods; she fucking lied. Stiles should have lied. Why didn't he lie? He could be working at the hip coffee place down the street from his dad's house instead of being once again trapped in the Hell of grease fryers and ketchup dispensers at his rinkydink little diner. “How is it, then?”

“I hate this place,” she snaps, lowering her voice and leaning across the counter to talk to Stiles more privately. “They have cameras in the back alley and, like, everywhere. I can't get away with anything.” That was one good thing about McDonald's – they got away with every thing. Well. Almost. “But, whatever. A job is a job, money is money. To be honest with you, I can't believe you even got a job. Like...why?”

Stiles plays with the lid on his drink, lowering his eyes and shrugging his shoulders. “I like to be self-sufficient.”

Erica snorts. “Living out of a fuckin' shoebox and peddling cheeseburgers for minimum wage plus tips isn't exactly being self-sufficient, Stiles.”

“It puts food on the table and a roof over my head.”

“You're being stubborn,” she sighs in a tired sort of way that suggests they've had this conversation a zillion times before, even though this is the first time he's seen her in...months. “Just like you always have been.”

“I don't want to live off my boyfriend's salary,” he dares to take a sip and burns his tongue, frowning. “I don't get why they makes me, like, stupid.”

Leaning back and giving Stiles a bemused look, she raises an eyebrow. “I thought you two were more than boyfriends? That's what all the magazines say.”

The magazines all say some variation of the same shit; Derek always scoffs and tosses them away whenever he finds Stiles with his hands on one of them, and starts grumbling under his breath about how humans don't fucking understand. There have been so many covers of Stiles and Derek in tabloids with a headline that reads something along the lines of HALEMATES or MATED HONEYMOON or some bullshit like that. So, in that respect, it is not at all a fucking surprise at all that Erica thinks boyfriends and mates are two completely different categories. They talk about it like they're already married.

Derek hasn't even bit Stiles with a mating bite, yet. There's no ring. There's no nothing. Stiles sometimes wonders what the deal is with that, but he doesn't want to ask, afraid of what Derek would have to say about it.

“He's my boyfriend,” Stiles says pointedly, and Erica pouts a frown. “He's not my husband, for Christ's sake, there's no reason for him to pay my bills for me.”

“Except for the fact that he's, like, loaded beyond. I would be demanding tickets to Paris every other week, if I were you.” She takes a second to stare at him longer, and then grins nice and wide. “By the way, how's the separation going?”

Another thing that's front page news – the fact that Stiles hasn't been present at any of Derek's signings or meet and greets or interviews since the tour started. Stiles has been spotted wandering around Beacon Hills, for the most part, and everyone is apparently either delighted at this news (I bet they're breaking up, yes, thank you God) or, er – disappointed (I'm going to fucking light myself on FUCKIN' FIRE IF STILES DOESN'T GO TO AT LEAST ONE I NEED HQ'S OF THEM SO BAD). It's also not surprising that Erica is clued into this, either.

“He's doing well,” Stiles says evasively, turning his eyes out to the parking lot. “He likes to travel and shit. Getting coffee at a new place every morning – it's some writer's bullshit, but he likes it, and he's having fun.”

Erica leans her chin into her fist. “How are you doing?”

Lonely, Stiles thinks. Very, very lonely. It's been two weeks, and Derek can only ever call at some outrageous time of night because Lydia keeps him busy at all times and the fans keep him busy and the travel keeps him busy and the flight attendants and pretty much everyone else aside from Stiles has got his attention. Stiles has started setting his alarm for three am just so he won't miss the vibrations, in case Derek calls him.

It's not entirely Derek's fault that he has no one to talk to or hang out with. Scott is busy with Allison, and he feels weird going back home too much to pester his dad, and – well. That about sums up the list of his personal contacts. Which is why he's standing here talking to Erica, of all fucking people.

“I'm fine,” Stiles says, ceasing to give a shit about the burn and swallowing down an entire sip.

Erica appears to read what he's not saying good and clear, however, because she sighs again and rolls her eyes. “That's a con to dating a big celebrity, you know,” she reminds him, as if he hasn't already sat up at night thinking about this exact truth. “He doesn't always have time for you.”

****

 _I get sad, and I get dark, and I don't want to talk to anyone. Not for days at a time. I don't even want to write. Explaining this to people that get close to me is difficult to the point where it's often times like we're not even speaking the same fucking language. It's always, don't you want someone to talk to? Don't you need someone to be there with you? Haven't you been alone enough? To be brutally honest, there's not a single person I'm ever willing to sacrifice my own silence for, entirely. (Beacons, Derek Hale pg. 122)_  
****

Stiles wakes up at one o'clock in the morning to his phone nearly vibrating off the end table. He blinks his eyes awake, as awake as he can get, and flips his body over to snatch it off the wood before it goes tumbling down onto his carpet.  
Groggily, he reads Derek's name, slides his index finger across the screen, and brings it to his ear. “Hey,” he rasps. Normally, Derek says some variation of an apology for waking Stiles up, but this time, all Stiles hears on the other end of the phone is what sounds like club music, and a woman screaming loudly to be heard over the thump thump thump.

Stiles hears Derek's voice then, and he sounds like he's not even talking into his phone. It's distant, and he can't make out exactly what he's saying, but it sounds a lot like two more, two more, then that's enough, I have to -

“Derek?” Stiles interrupts, rubbing at his eyes. When he gets no response, he starts grumbling under his breath about one in fuckin' morning and you butt dial me from some ritzy bullshit club in downtown New York suck my fuckin' -

“Stiles?” Finally, Derek's addressing him directly. “Stiles, hey.”

“Yup,” Stiles snaps, irritably. He's not he nicest person after having just been woken up, and Derek has been dealing with this attitude ever since he called the first night at four am, so he's more or less used to it. “Been here for a minute.”

There's a crash on the other line, Derek saying something under his breath, and then the sound of the club and the party or whatever die down. He must have gone into the backroom, or the VIP section. “What the fuck time is it there?”

Stiles glances at the clock. “Nearly two.”

“In the morning?”

“Nah, afternoon,” Stiles rolls his eyes. “That's why the sun is so bright.”

Derek deflects this easily. “I've lost track of time, Jesus Christ.”

Stiles pauses, and then rubs his forehead. “Are you drunk?”

“Yeah,” he says back.

Stiles has seen Derek drunk exactly two times since they met each other. That night that they got into a fight outside of his party when they were still just fucking around, and a second time at Scott's house because he's apparently a colossal failure at quarters in spite of being a werewolf. One thing that Stiles thinks he's figured out about Derek is that he either goes stark raving mad when he gets drunk and tries to fight everyone and everything, or he becomes completely and utterly useless. Stiles still gets phantom pains on his shoulder from having to haul Derek's drunk, incognizant ass down Scott's apartment complex stairs out to the Range Rover because he couldn't even stand up right.

Either one, either which way, Stiles isn't in the mood. “Go drink some water or something,” Stiles pulls his covers back up over himself and feels sad. “I'm tired, I don't want to -”

“I have to tell you something,” Derek interrupts, talking quicker than usual. “We're celebrating over here, I've been trying to call you, but I couldn't get away.”

Stiles settles his head onto his pillow and yawns. “Celebrating what?”

“Stiles,” Derek draws his name out oddly – drunkenly. “I've already sold three million.”

“What?”

“Copies. I've sold three fucking million copies of Beacons in under two weeks.”

Stiles knew Beacons was going to sell, because all of Derek's books have sold, and sold well. He's one of the highest paid authors in the United States outside of franchises, probably worldwide but Stiles doesn't have the fucking statistics on that – so he knew Derek was going to be raking in some coin with this newest one. If memory serves him correctly, his highest seller was Reborn with just under a million in its first week, and even that was sort of staggering. People don't sell that much in books, anymore, not unless you're releasing an 8th god damn Harry Potter.

Derek has literally sold what Taylor Swift fucking sells, if not maybe more.

“Oh, my God,” Stiles sits back up again, looking around his tiny bedroom and running his hand through his hair, dumbfounded. “Oh, my God.”

“The number of people who have been coming to the signings -” even in a slur, Stiles can tell that Derek is out of sorts, right now, in rare fucking form. Derek in a good mood is one of the rarest experiences Stiles gets to see. “-it's just insane. I've never had to turn people away even after staying hours beyond – I mean – the – I mean -”

“This is amazing,” Stiles interrupts before Derek goes post-vocal. “This is fucking phenomenal.”

“You know it's because of you,” Derek shoots back, and that gives Stiles some pause. “I couldn't have sold even half that if it weren't for you.”

Why? Stiles thinks. Why would that ever be the fucking case? “I don't think -”

“Look, I have to go. I wanna talk to you, I wanna see you, I have to go.” The music gets louder, so Derek's stepped back into the party, is hanging up any second now. “I need you to know. I wanted you to be the first person I told, but I – you know.” Yeah. Yeah, Stiles knows. “I have to go, all right? We'll talk again, okay?”

Before Stiles can even get the I miss you out of his mouth, Derek has hung up, leaving Stiles with his phone in his hand, glaring out into the dark of his bedroom.

****

“Unholy lord,” Scott says when Stiles slides a hamburger in front of him. “That's – damn. Is that good? Like – in terms of the going rate for book sales?”  
Stiles nods his head, glancing over his shoulder to make sure that no one's come in that he needs to pay attention to. “That's really fucking good for a book, dude.”

“I can't remember the last time I even heard about book sales,” Scott begins dousing his french fries in salt and pepper while Stiles leans his hip up against the edge of the table. “I can't remember the last time anyone cared?”

The last time people fucking cared is when Back to the Flames came out, and all anyone heard about for a solid month is how Derek Hale's sales kept climbing up and up and up; at least, if you gave a shit about Derek Hale at the time, you were paying attention. Stiles thinks he remembers From the Ashes selling something like fifty thousand in his first week, which for a first book ain't fucking bad, and Reborn nearly getting to a million, and Back to the Flames sort of staggered in its release in comparison with about half a million but it picked up as time went on, and now...

Derek's never sold this well. Three million in two weeks is an average of 1.5 million each week – that's, like, honorary New York Times Bestseller's List for the next fucking month, no matter if he doesn't sell another copy for months. It's literally insane for Stiles to think about.

“What is that?” A bit of bun comes out of Scott's mouth as he talks and chews, and Stiles averts his eyes. “Like, two copies sold every second or something?”

“He told me the signings are like battles of Hogwarts, pretty much,” in so many words – drunkenly at two o'clock in the morning, but he said it, all the same. “He's had to turn people away.”

“Well...” Scott gives Stiles a calculating look, putting his burger down and wiping his hands on his jeans. “This is good news!”

Stiles nods his head again, patting around in his pockets for his tips so he can count them during the lull.

“...boyfriend is successful and all.” A pause, Stiles sifting through ones and quarters. “...you don't seem that excited.”

Lifting his eyes from his money, Stiles shakes his head. “I'm fucking ecstatic,” he slaps a ten-stack of ones down and moves onto counting the next. “I'm happy, I'm excited, I'm proud, I'm a million other adjectives denoting positivity.”

“But...” Scott prompts, moving his hand in the air. For all the time people have spent calling Scott an airhead, one thing he has an unbelievable affinity for is being able to tell when Stiles is withholding information from him. It's like his special talent; you can't fib, lie, or bullshit him. Not when you're Stiles, at least.

Rubbing his money hands across his face and settling himself down on the edge of the booth, he releases a long, long breath. Obviously, and of course, Derek being successful isn't an issue to Stiles, because that would be insane. Being in a committed and serious relationship means that their success is your success in a way, as well. Stiles is genuinely so fucking happy for Derek and proud, and he's amazing, and Stiles almost isn't surprised that Derek is selling so well, because of course. But...

“...he said something really fucking weird to me when he told me,” Stiles admits, finally letting out what had kept him wide awake since Derek had hung up on him the night before.

Scott blinks at him from over his hamburger, waiting. Stiles tries to convince himself he's being stupid, it's so stupid, why is he even thinking about it, when there's so much more important things going on, but...he just can't shake the feeling that it was weird that he fucking said that?

“He told me that I'm the reason he sold so many this time,” Stiles says, and it comes out like a confused question, like he doesn't fucking get how that sentence even exists. Because he doesn't.

“Okay. And?”

“And nothing.”

“That's what you're being so weird about?” Scott has half a smile on his face, confused and a little mocking. “It sounds like a compliment to me, honestly.”

“Because it was weird, Scott, it was just – weird.” Stiles doesn't write the books, Stiles doesn't sign the books, Stiles has absolutely no-fucking-thing to do with any of the production of them. He has no idea how to write worth a damn outside of History essays, and even then, he used to spend hours trying to come up with a concluding paragraph. In what universe is any of Derek's success to be attributed to him? Five months ago, he worked at McDonald's, for Christ's sake.

“It makes perfect sense to me,” he pops a fry in his mouth, casual as all get out, like this conversation is already half done. “You probably give him, like, fucking wicked publicity.”

“Derek doesn't care about that shit,” Stiles mutters, glaring at his nailbeds.

“Maybe not. People do, though.”

Right. People do. Derek rants and raves constantly about how much he hates doing PR, hates interviews, magazine covers, pictures, all of it, but at the end of the day, Stiles knows that he knows what puts gas in his fucking luxury cars. It's undeniable that PR matters. People talking about him, not necessarily what they say but so long as they say something, matters. If Stiles were to look at a correlation between how many tabloids and articles and entertainment news segments in the past year have mentioned Derek Hale and how many copies of Beacons he's selling, he's positive there'd be a fucking positive upward trend.

Stiles can only wonder what the correlation between his name being mentioned and book sales is in relation to that.

“That's what he meant, I think,” Scott goes on, oblivious as ever. “His relationship with you is probably the entire reason that book is blowing up. I mean – you are a feature in it, aren't you?”

He has an intrusive memory of that time, months ago, now, when he had talked to Derek on the phone in the parking lot of the truck stop. He still vividly remembers what it felt like to hear Derek so fucking casually dismiss Stiles coming to his party as publicity, like Lydia was a puppet master and he and Stiles were just at the end of the strings.

It had felt shitty. It had felt like Derek thought of him as a prop. And, what's so god damn awful about thinking of it now, is that he had more or less convinced himself it wasn't like that anymore.

Because it isn't like that anymore. It can't be.

“What's that like, anyway?” Scott interrupts, and Stiles quickly sits up to collect his money off the table, feeling half out of his head in thought. “Being in a book that literally millions of people are reading, right now?”

****

What Scott said at the diner must have been a fucking summons, or something, because where in the previous two and a half weeks he's managed to scrape by with only catching sight of the cover of Beacons hanging in the local book store and seeing commercials for it on television, now, suddenly, he's being fucking inundated.  
He walks into Erica's coffee house and sees two separate girls at two separate couches curled up with copies, and even though they've taken the jackets off the books, he can still see D. Hale emblazoned in gold on the spines. For some reason, his cheeks flush.

He notices that one of the girls is at at least page four hundred, and his cheeks flush even deeper. If either of them notice or recognize him, they politely ignore him, which Stiles is thankful for. He doesn't know what he'd say if one of Derek's fans approached him and asked him for, what? A picture? An autograph? Stiles makes minimum wage and has a Virgin Mary stain on his ceiling. He shouldn't be signing autographs on anything except bankruptcy paperwork, honestly.

He runs out of gas money for his piece of shit Jeep and has to take the bus to work, and winds up sitting next to a college kid reading page two hundred and five of Beacons – the part where Derek goes on a five page long rant about all the shitty therapists he's gone to in his day. Don't get Stiles wrong. He honest to god has always thought that Derek is a genius, honestly, but every now and then, even in From the Ashes days, Stiles would come across a single paragraph or a single rant and just cock his head to the side and wonder if Derek pretty much just uses his books as a soapbox. Which, Stiles guesses, is the point. But, Christ, he's never met someone with such an affinity for just going off about shit. That time, he kept catching the kid taking surreptitious glances at him from the corner of his eyes, which would explain why in their entire ten minute ride together, he never made it past the page he started on.

Stiles is thankful for several days that no one tries to approach him, starts thanking his lucky stars for it, actually, profusely. Which turns out to be a mistake, because of course, immediately after that, someone approaches him.

Outside in the early Fall sun, staggering around with an iced coffee in one hand and his phone in the other, having an incredibly dramatic text conversation with his boss about how he wasn't supposed to be scheduled on Mondays, ever, and someone calls his name.

“Stiles?”

What should've tipped him off is the unsure way it's spoken. Like, is that you? If Stiles had even a third of the experience that Derek has with being noticed in public, he'd have known to immediately start walking faster or duck behind a park bench or say nah, sorry, wrong guy, I get that a lot though.

Instead, since he's a baby idiot, he turns his head and squints directly at the source of the voice, not even thinking that it could be a complete stranger who just recognizes his face from television. He pockets his phone, cocks his head to the side, and appraises the girl trying to make eye contact with him. She looks like a normal teenager, maybe college aged, maybe works at a book store somewhere. But she's got this look on her face like she's just found a four leaf clover or an actual fucking leprechaun, and to top it all off, she's got one of those unofficial Derek shirts on.

Derek pretty adamantly refuses to have his likeness slapped onto shirts, trademarked his name so no one could get away with it unless they wanted a fucking lawsuit, and most of his official merch consists of his books. Lydia talked him into letting pens with his name be manufactured, and then a simple leather cord bracelet with a charm that looks like flames. Derek despises the stuff.

The point is, the only shirts people can get to show off how Number One Derek Stan they are come off of sites like etsy and cafepress, and they're pretty...creative. Since Derek trademarked as much as he could, there's very few things they can come up with. This girl is wearing one that Stiles recognizes instantaneously, because it's one of the uglier ones he's ever found on the internet. He remembers distinctly pulling up a picture of it on his phone, laughing to the point of tears, before showing it to Derek, who grumbled something about god damn freshman art majors think they're so fucking slick.

As soon as Stiles sees the thing in its entirety, the flames and the words and the hideous, he starts trying to back pedal. He literally sees the red alert emoji in his head, the cop car emoji, starts hearing 911 911 911 911, sirens, ambulance, abort. He's about to spin around on his heel and make a break for it, but she's already walking towards him. This is a public forum. If he were to literally start bolting, shoving a girl half his size away from him into a wall....that would not go over well.

People would talk. And if there's one thing he thinks that Derek would literally get mad at him over, it would be something like that.

So, he stands there, stock still, mouth hanging open, as she gets within two feet of him and clutches the straps of her messenger bag so tight her knuckles go white. “Hi,” she says, shyly.

Fuck. Basic conversational techniques 101 suddenly flies out of Stiles' head, and all he can do for a second is stare back blankly – his mind is still on flight. “Uh -”

“I'm sorry to bother you,” she gets out in a rush, cheeks going bright red. “I just – I came from Sacramento.” Where the fuck is Sacramento? Suddenly, Stiles has no idea what the word even means. “I really wanted to see Beacon Hills, because, um, the way Derek writes about it is so...I don't know.”

The way Derek writes about Beacon Hills is the way he thinks New Yorkers write about the garbage piles on the sidewalks – sort of in a well would you look at this lovable pile of shit. I love my trash home. Stiles guesses that just sort of translates into it seeming like some great fucking place to his fans, and maybe he's always known better just because he's actually from here.

Stiles' mind catches up to him, he swallows, and he says, “how are you liking the nothing?”

Like this is the single funniest joke of all time, she cackles. Stiles rears back a bit, taken off guard, an uncomfortable smile making its way onto his face. “He never said you were funny.”

Cocking his head to the side, Stiles tries really hard not to question her about that. Because – does she really think that he's exactly as Derek wrote him? Does she and everyone else really think that Derek's bullshit, starry-eyed, prose-riddled explanation of what Stiles is really like is anything like what he's really like? In Beacons, Stiles is a nameless, faceless dream boy with wide eyes and clever fingers and constellations on his cheeks. He's, literally, novelized.

Stiles sort of thought people would get that. He guesses not. “He's never said a lot of things about me,” he chooses to say, carefully. How fucking weird it is to talk about Derek in pronouns with a person neither of them have ever fucking met before.

“I'm sorry -” she starts, rubbing her forehead, “I'm making you feel weird – I'm just – I just – I didn't think I'd see you here.”

“I live here,” Stiles says, for lack of anything else to say. She literally looks five steps away from bursting into tears and that's – insane.

Bursting into tears in front of Derek, Stiles understands, because he's probably done a lot for werewolf kids growing up, and probably done a lot for kids who dream about being authors like him, and kids look up to him in general and that's great.

But Stiles is, again, nothing more than a character in a book. Not even that, really. He's a ghost, in a way. Some phantom figure that Derek created out of his own head and perceptions. Why anyone would cry over meeting the original that the print copy is based off of is just beyond him.

“I don't want to take up anymore of your time,” she stutters, and then she's rifling through that bag of hers, and Stiles is looking over his shoulder wondering how close he is to escape. “But would it be – I mean – could I please -” her phone is in her hand, and Stiles knows what's coming. He just cannot fucking believe it. “Can I ask for a picture? You can say no,” the last part is rushed out of her mouth like she wants to say it just to say she said it, but she doesn't really want Stiles to hear it.

After blinking three straight times in a row, Stiles finds his voice. “Yeeahhh....” Stiles says, half unsure and half bamboozled. “Okay. Uh.”

She beams at him, hands the phone off to the passerby who looks like he recognizes Stiles too (but doesn't look too fucking thrilled about it; Stiles ignores the dirty look to the best of his ability), and then suddenly Stiles is awkwardly putting his arm around a girl he's never met before and smiling for a picture. He wonders what his face looks like, right now, if he's doing a good job at covering up the shock and discomfort, or if he just looks shell shocked. He feels that way often. He has since meeting Derek.

Either way, the moment is over, and she thanks him again and again, before scurrying off to do whatever the Hell it is she thought she was going to do here when she made the trip.

****

Stiles gets a text from Derek that nearly gives him a fucking heart attack - because it's...that picture. That one. Stiles is calling Derek within seconds of getting the picture, because he thought that picture would rest in that girl's phone for all eternity, or be her twitter profile picture for as long as she's going through her Derek and Stiles phase, and then it would just be, like, gone. Forever. And Stiles would never have to think about it.  
Instead, here's Derek fucking texting it to him. And, the thing about Derek, is that he doesn't look at gossip anything. He doesn't lurk in his tags like Stiles does, oh no. If Derek is seeing this god damn picture, and is saving it to his phone and sending it to Stiles, it means that...a lot of people have seen this picture, have been seeing it, up until the knowledge that Stiles is walking around taking pictures with people reached Lydia's desk, she rubbed her temples in agitation, and sent the intel to Derek. Who – well. Stiles doesn't yet know what Derek's reaction has been to this.

He's about to find out.

“Where,” Stiles starts the second Derek's voice comes over the receiver. “The fuck...”

“Five people have sent that to me already,” Derek says; he doesn't sound angry, but he does sound vaguely amused. “I thought it was a photoshop at first. I recognize that girl.”

“Oh, my God.”

“She's come to, I don't know. Eight of my signings?”

“Oh, my God...”

“Where was that taken? That looks like -”

“Beacon idiotic Hills,” Stiles says, and he paces across his bedroom floor once, before turning on his heels and glaring out at nothing. “She said she, like, journeyed here.”

Derek pauses. “Just to find you.”

“No,” his voice is forceful. “Absolutely not. She said she wanted to see the town and shit, I was just...conveniently in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

There's a second pause, this one more loaded. Derek clears his throat, and sighs on the other line. “She stalked you down.”

“What? No,” he shakes his head again and again, even though Derek can't even see him right now. “No way did she actually and honestly drive all the way here just to find me.”

Like this information somehow causes Derek great fucking chagrin and horror, he says, “she literally did, Stiles.”

Stiles rubs his forehead, tries to think straight for a moment. Thinking that she just wanted to see the fabled Beacon Hills and that she just happened to stumble upon Stiles in what to her was a wonderful stroke of luck is one thing. Thinking that she went out of her way, like, miles and hours and money out of her way, to come and hunt him down, literally, is... “I'm fuckin' moving.”

There's more sighing from Derek's end, and Stiles is picturing him in his fancy hotel room somewhere, a tumbler of whiskey in his hand, glaring out at whatever city he's in now (Chicago? Georgia? Nasvhille?). “I should have brought you with me is what I should have done,” Derek growls, and suddenly Stiles knows that the fun has left the building. Derek is in a mood.

Trying to lighten it up, even though Stiles has enough experience to know that that never works, he says, “a remote location off the coast of Italy. Poveglia, maybe.”

There's some shuffling, Derek saying something to whoever he might be sitting there with, and then his voice is very loud in Stiles' ear. “I'm gonna fly you out.”

“Okay...” Stiles says, slowly. “I was joking about Poveglia. I'd shit my pants there.”

“To Houston, Stiles.” He says this in a tone of voice that suggests that the flight is already being booked, that Lydia is already starting to scream at top volume somewhere about a mistake being made.

“I think,” he keeps his tone even, trying to soothe the beast so to speak, “...you are overreacting.” It's really quite comical to Stiles that anyone on the outside of the situation would look at the two of them as a couple and instantaneously assume that Stiles would be the one who would take things too far or too seriously or go off the handles. Frankly, Derek is the fucking emotional one in the relationship. Stiles remembers some justification for this in Back to the Flames, like, ah, I am a writer, I am wise, I must feel the emotions on the full spectrum. Like? Okay, Taylor Swift.

Derek makes a noise of disagreement. “I'm reacting exactly like anyone else would when discovering people are starting to stalk their significant other, Stiles.”

“No one is – okay. Okay. You just hang on a second,” he's pacing again, waving his free hand a bit in the air. “We are talking about the most innocuous person I have ever met in my life, here! She was nice.”

“Was she?” It's a mocking tone of voice that Stiles doesn't appreciate much, so he snaps his jaw shut with an annoyed click. “That's great. They're not all friendly, harmless teenage, human girls, Stiles.”

“I have some really, really shocking news about the vast majority of your fanbase, Derek.”

Derek growls again, frustrated, and Stiles doesn't even flinch. “The fans are one thing. The fans I don't worry about, the girls would never fucking do anything to you, not even the ones that hate you,” Derek has always called his fans the girls, so at least he's self aware. “It's the people that don't like me so much I'm worried about. If a teenage girl can drive her way up to Beacon Hills to find it, and it's that easy, then -”

Stiles rolls his eyes. “No one is going to use me to get to you, Derek, this isn't some mafia crime movie -”

“This is werewolves. Do you understand that? Because it sounds like you fucking don't get that.”

He's running his fingers over and over his forehead, again, scrunching his face up in tension and just in general feeling a little startled. What started out as a maybe funny happenstance is quickly turning into something that's not really all that funny at all. It's the longest conversation Derek and Stiles have had in nearly three weeks, and it's basically a fucking argument. Great.

“I'm an alpha. There are people, werewolves, out there who would do just about anything to find a way to take my power from me, and I'd say it's about public knowledge by now that I have a weakness.”

He might not be wrong about that. Stiles hasn't thought about it, and he's betting that Derek has been dutifully denying it himself, but...being with Derek does sort of paint a target on his back. Stiles only ever thought about being recognized, about people reading intimate details about him in the books, about people taking pictures of him, but he never thought about the other end of the spectrum. There are definitely people out there who would snatch Stiles up off the streets and hold him hostage with Derek's alpha powers as the ransom.

To Stiles, though, it feels unlikely, at best. His father is a sheriff. His boyfriend is quite possibly psycho. No one would have the fucking balls to really go through with it.

Would they?

“I'm fine,” Stiles insists, still using his calm voice. “It was literally funny to me, okay? You are really reading way too much into this. No one is going to try to whack me off.”

“It isn't a fucking joke -”

“I'm not coming to Houston,” Stiles interrupts before Derek gets any steam on what sounded like another one of his take one god damn fucking thing seriously for one god damn second, Stiles rants. Stiles has started pulling out his phone to play candy crush every time Derek starts off on that. “I'm just not. There's barely even a week left in the tour, you'll be home soon, you're being nutty.”

Dead, deafening silence on the other end of the phone, and Stiles traces the pattern of the stain on his ceiling with his eyes, tapping his fingers against his knee. He doesn't like fighting with Derek, and he highly doubts Derek is much of a fan himself, but sometimes their personalities are so much like oil and water that they can't help it. “If anything ever fucking happened to you...”

“I've been without the protection of an alpha werewolf for nearly my entire life up to this point, and I'm still here, aren't I?”

“Sometimes, I really get the feeling you don't realize who I am.”

“Uh, I had a poster of you on my wall for like, four years.” It was a really dreamy photo of him, as well – wet white t-shirt at the beach. Stiles wishes he still had it, honestly. “I know who you are.”

Derek goes quiet again, and Stiles feels tired from this argument already. Derek can be that way – just fucking emotionally draining, sometimes. When he talks again, his voice is low. “If you don't want to come, you don't have to come.”

“It's not – don't be – it's not I don't want to. It's, there's no point. I can't miss work. I have – I have rent due.” When there's more silence, Stiles huffs out a sigh. Derek fucking loves to start fights, initiates them, gets angry, but then he'll just go quiet. Stiles always imagines in these moments that Derek is sitting there writing something dramatic in his head, like, he has a stubborn streak a mile wide and never listens to anything I say and life is difficult. Stiles isn't a writer, all right? “I miss you, but I'm not coming to Houston just so Lydia can glare at me and treat me like an invalid -”

“She -”

“Hates me,” Stiles finishes with little to no emotion. He's accepted it, now. “Thinks I'm some vixen who's going to suck all the money of your dick, or something. It's whatever. I'm fine. But I can't just take up space in your hotel room and sit around waiting for you to get done at all your stuff, it's why I didn't come in the first place, remember?” Maybe a little vindictively, Stiles reminds him, “your idea, buddy. You said you didn't want me to be bored.”

Derek sighs. “I haven't called enough.” He sounds guilty.

“I have this mental image of Lydia caging your phone up or slapping you on the wrist with a ruler every time you even try to text me.”

Pause. And then, reluctantly, “kind of.”

Stiles snorts. He fucking knew it. “Look. Obviously it's just separation anxiety that has you going bananas over there. It's not – I'm absolutely fine. If anyone tried to touch me, my dad would shoot them before you could even get your claws out, so just don't even worry about it.”

He laughs for a second, but it doesn't sound like there's any real humor in it. “Half of what I do is worry about you, Stiles.”

****

 _I've lived lifetimes. Not just one, but dozens, it feels like. The life I had before the fire is a lifetime in and of itself, it's cliché and I've said it before, but I never came out of that the same. I started over. I had no choice. The life I lived after that, before I started writing again. Then the life after my first book. For a while, writing and being alone, that's just what I did. Then, when I met him, a new one. And another one every time I can't see him, even if it's just a day. (Beacons, Derek Hale pg. 412)_  
****

Stiles honestly didn't know what to expect upon seeing Derek for the first time after an entire month of being apart and really hardly ever speaking. It sort of felt like they did not handle the long distance thing well, not at all, and it also felt like they would wind up on rocky, awkward ground when they first saw each other again. They fought more than they said they missed each other or that they loved each other, really. And, yes, Derek and Stiles argue a lot to begin with, but these fights felt...different. Stiles doesn't know what to think.  
Derek said he'd be home by ten, so Stiles was going to order pizza to his mansion and wait around for him, and then his flight got delayed, and then delayed again, and Stiles ate the pizza mostly himself and fantasized about telling Lydia the fuck off. He just knows she somehow has control over the weather to keep Stiles and Derek apart for as long as she physically can.

All the same, Stiles is passed out asleep in Derek's bed by the time Derek finally gets back home. Stiles doesn't wake when the front door opens and closes, doesn't wake when the hallway light gets turned on, doesn't wake when Derek opens up the bedroom door – but he has no choice but to wake up when Derek drops his bag with an audible thunk onto the floor.

Stiles groggily turns over, still in all his clothes, socks still on his feet while his sneakers are in a pile on the floor at the foot of the bed, and blinks at him hazily for a second. This is a very familiar scene; Stiles half asleep, Derek just getting home, his silhouette in the doorway.

“Bringing your own bags upstairs?” Stiles heckles, voice cut to shreds from sleep. “How menial and peasant of you.” From this angle, and in this little light, Stiles can't make out the expression on Derek's face. It comes as a surprise to him, then, when Derek literally just flops his entire body on top of Stiles' like a dead fish and plunks them both down onto the mattress hard enough that the bed frame shakes.

Stiles lets out a squawk that turns into a laugh, wrapping his arm around Derek's mid back and letting the wolf inhale his scent like he's been waiting to do it for a long, long time. Probably the hoodie and the other clothes that Derek brought along with them lost that particular Stiles zest within the first week of Derek using them for pillows.

“I fucking missed you,” Derek says, voice muffled by Stiles' neck. “I fucking missed you, holy shit.”

“Same,” Stiles says, curling his fingers into the hairs at the base of Derek's neck. “Every time I saw a man in a leather jacket, I got very sad. I had no fun. I ate burnt burgers for dinner by myself every night. How was five star dining in New York City?”

“Terrible,” Derek groans, and Stiles smiles. “I'm not going to let Lydia fucking do that shit anymore,” Derek promises, lifting his face out of Stiles' neck so it sounds at least somewhat serious. “I'm not stupid, I know what she was doing.”

Silently, Stiles runs his fingers up and down Derek's arm, choosing not to make comments. He had honestly started to believe that Derek was a little oblivious to all that, but of course, Stiles is the dumb one in the end. Of course Derek would catch on. He's Derek.

“She's been -” he grinds his teeth for a moment. “She always has this way of acting like she controls me, but this was just – it won't happen again. If she pulls it again, I'll just...”

Derek wouldn't ever fire Lydia Martin. He would be fucking insane to do so, at this point in his career; she gave him his first four bestsellers, his first interview and every other after that, his household notoriety, his money, his every thing. And that, by the way, includes Stiles. It would be a career risk to drop Lydia. Stiles would never ask Derek to do so.

“Tell her to put a cork in it,” Stiles offers, and Derek grins at him. It's not that funny of a joke, but Derek looks like he's been fucking missing Stiles' dumbass commentary.

“Just...no more of that. All right? You and me. I don't want you to forget that I'm all yours.” He picks Stiles' hand up and presses it up against his own chest, right where his heart is, squeezing Stiles' fingers affectionately. “Yours first.”

Stiles isn't much one for romantic proclamations, but Derek is deep, and he says shit like this. Stiles means it, of course he does, but his cheeks burn when he says back, “yours first,” in a near whisper. “We got into fights.”

“Stupid.” Derek says resolutely. “Stupid, stupid. I was just in that environment, and it was all...” he trails off, waves his hand in the air. If he were sitting at his laptop, he'd be able to write a full five paragraphs of what the environment was like, in perfect flying colors. But he's not that eloquent in person. No one ever is. Personally, Stiles prefers the Derek that doesn't talk in fucking metaphors all the time.

“Dumb,” Stiles finishes for him. “I bet you had a dumb time.”

“The absolute dumbest.”

“Pfft. New York. Chicago. LA. Shantytowns, the lot of them.”

“Which reminds me.” Derek pulls off of Stiles for a second, leaning down over the end of the bed to paw at one of his bags for a second. Stiles watches, and when Derek comes back up with a big plastic bag that says CHICAGO in huge white letters, he sits up immediately and makes gimme gestures.

“Don't tell me -”

Derek presents him with the bag, a smug grin on his face. When Stiles rips the bag out of his hand and dumps the contents out, he's not embarrassed to say that he very nearly squeals in delight.

“Gift shop trash!”

Derek has figured out that Stiles doesn't really like grand gestures or gifts, much. Sure, once in a while, a nice dinner, a nice surprise is great, but just...all the time, with that? Stiles doesn't like it. It's a good thing Derek caught on. But he was never going to come back from a cross country expedition without bringing Stiles something, and Derek's mind is like a steel trap so he remembered that Stiles has a weird obsession with trinkets, so – gift shop trash.

He picks up the Salt Lake City snow globe, the 2.99 stamp still on the bottom, and shakes it furiously. “I love this,” he says honestly, eyeballing the snow as it falls before looking down at the tiny plush Chicago bull, the LA bumper sticker, the solar powered key chain from Nashville. It reads Stan at him, flashing on and off, and when Derek catches him looking at it with a confused expression on his face, he says, “the closest they had.”

“Incredible.” Stiles immediately fingers around in his pocket for his keys and slides Stan on with the rest – his car key, his apartment key, Scott's apartment, his dad's house, and the three houses Derek has taken Stiles to. Stiles has never asked how many houses Derek exactly has, but he thinks it's many. In many different parts of the country. He looks up and meets Derek's eyes again, smiling. “Thank you for the trash.”

Derek rolls his eyes, but smiles all the same. “Have you looked at the numbers?”

“I was waiting for you to tell me.” Stiles has been avoiding social media and magazines and newspapers and entertainment news ever since Derek called and told him the first numbers, the three fucking million. For all he knows, Derek has plummeted into the black abyss, not making another dime. But, from the look on his face, Stiles can go ahead and assume that's not the case. “What is it, then? Three whole copies?”

In a somewhat rare display of bashfulness, Derek ducks his head and smiles down at his hands for a second, toying with a loose thread on his t-shirt before lifting his eyes again. He shrugs, choosing a spot to stare at on the wall behind Stiles' head. “I'm at five million.”

Leaning forward, Stiles grabs onto Derek's hand and squeezes it tightly in his own. “That's so fucking great, Derek. Seriously.”

“It's insane, is what it is,” he says back, lowering his eyes again. “Nonfiction authors don't sell like this. I – it's a -”

“Phenomenon.” Pulling his hand out of Derek's, he cups Derek's jaw and grins. “Is the word you're looking for.”

“I wish you could have seen the crowds. People asked about you so many times at every single signing – I swear, some of them came just to meet you.”

Unlikely, Stiles thinks, keeping the smile in place on his face. Who goes to a book signing just to meet the kid who's mentioned a few dozen times in the last hundred pages? “So, you had a good time, then?”

Derek nods. Although he hates crowds, and hates the public, and hates people, he has a particular sort of soft spot for the people who buy his books, for the fans. The girls. Most likely, if he could, he'd spend a week straight sitting at a table, signing books and taking pictures with them all. He's one of those rare kind of people who get money and knows where it comes from, doesn't treat his fanbase like mindless idiots who just like him because he's good looking. “I wanted you there, though.”

Even though it's said genuinely, and Stiles most likely knows that he means it, he can't shake the feeling that he just would've been in the way. Like, somehow, he wouldn't have belonged there. Like he just doesn't fit.

Stiles wakes up the next morning to the sun beaming into his eyes.

He sits up, bare legs all tangled up in the sheets, and hazily glares at the window in question. The curtain is pulled back just enough in the perfect spot that the yellow light is spotlighted directly on his face. He grumbles, flips himself over onto his back, and tries to turn the other way to burrow into Derek's neck for some darkness...

...and finds nothing but an ice cold pillow for his troubles. His eyes fly open again, startled by the temperature and the clear lack of Derek there. For a second he's genuinely confused. Was Derek coming home last night just a fucking dream, or something? The single most realistic hallucination he's ever had?

Logic has him peering over the edge of the bed and finding Derek's bags still in more or less the same spot they were last night, so he knows that Derek from last night at least was not a figment of his imagination. They're opened up, though, clothes and shoes strewn all over the place, like he had been digging through them at some point, probably at bumfuck o'clock while Stiles snored and twitched in his sleep, dead to the world. Even after a late night like last night, Derek can early rise with the squirrels and birds. It's one of his more endearing personality traits, Stiles guesses, especially since he never ever tries to shake Stiles awake with him. A wise man, that one.

Either way, this is a little much. Day after a month long trek across the country, and he has no interest in lying in his own bed and cuddling with Stiles for a couple minutes, at least? Stiles pulls himself out of the bed, wraps the white sheet around his naked body because he's too tired to fish for where Derek threw his clothes last night, and hobbles out into the hallway.

He peers around, and as he suspected, the door to Derek's study and library is cracked open. He swish swishes with his sheet, eyes still half closed, and creaks the door open wider to poke his body through.

Derek is just sitting there at his desk, which he hasn't sat at since finishing Beacons and shipping the final copy off months ago, so color Stiles confused as to why he would be there now. He's got a highlighter in between his teeth, fingers on his keyboard tapping a mile a minute, and filled in post-it notes strewn all around him. Neon pink. Stiles had bought those for him as a gag gift because har har writers get ideas everywhere and you gotta have someplace to put them, but as it turns out, Derek actually and legitimately gets ideas everywhere and he has to have someplace to put them.

“What are you doin'?” Stiles asks him in his sleep-thick voice, burrowing deeper into his sheet to fight against the cold. “It's morning.”

“It's nine o'clock,” Derek corrects mildly after opening his mouth so the highlighter falls into his lap, not taking his fingers off the keys. “The world is awake.”

“I'm asleep.”

Derek finally moves his eyes away from his laptop screen, looks Stiles up and down, from the bedhead mess to the sheet coiling around his feet, and smiles at him. “I can see that.”

For a moment, Stiles is glued to his spot, blinking hazily at Derek. Listening to the big fancy grandfather clock with the fire damage ticking away in the corner, and Derek's incessant finger tapping against the keys. Something about this scene is bizarre to him. Mostly because he's so fucking exhausted he can't think straight, and also because he used to see it all the time when they first got together and Derek would be in this room until three in the morning trying to get the thing finished. Stiles used to sit in here combing through Derek's book collection, but that was...a while ago.

He thought he wouldn't be setting foot in here until the next book. Which he didn't think would be coming for a while yet.

“What's that?” Stiles asks, swishing forward a bit more to peer at Derek's laptop.

Derek doesn't lift his eyes, but he slows his typing a bit. “Did I not mention this last night?”

“Um,” he flips through his mental rolodex of last night. Derek came home, gift shop presents, talking, sex, talking, sex, sleep.

“Slipped my mind.” His fingers slap against the keys for a couple of more seconds, deliberately, and then a final smack of his index finger on a period, and he's turning his body around to look Stiles directly in the face, hands on his knees. “They've already given me a deadline for my fifth.”

Since Stiles is processing slow, he does not fully react to this. He says, “oh...” in a confused tone of voice that Derek must recognize. He just crinkles his eyes at the corners in a smile, and shakes his head.

“Apparently I'm too successful to sit around with my thumb up my ass. Lydia's words.”

Or, too successful to sit around up Stiles' ass. But, nevermind that, Stiles thinks vindictively. “Deadline?”

“First draft in seven months.”

“What the fuck.” That seems unrealistic. It's the best Stiles can come up with right now. “What – the – fuck.”

“Baby,” Derek turns back to his laptop, fingers returning to the keys. And conversation over. “Go back to sleep.”

Stiles feels ready for an argument out of nowhere, but not about the sleeping bit. He's disoriented, exhausted, and somewhat annoyed – so, yes. Sleep it is. He gives the side of Derek's face a confused glare, and then staggers over to the big couch Derek has pushed up all the way on the opposite side of the room, in between two huge bookshelves and far from the windows for optimum napping. As soon as his body is among the soft pillows, he's out like a light.

Three hours later, Stiles sits up, stares at the back of Derek's head, and says, “you're writing your fifth book?”

Derek had been leaning back in his chair clicking a pen for the past five minutes, staring blankly at his laptop with an untouched bagel sitting right next to him. The smell of the bagel had been what woke Stiles up, by the way, not the pen clicking. When he hears Stiles' voice, he ceases his clicking, and swivels his chair around. “Awake now?”

Stiles runs his hands up and down his face, through his hair, lets the sheet drop down around his waist. Derek watches as the fabric moves down Stiles' skin, and Stiles chooses to ignore that, for the moment. Much more pressing matters at hand. “You're? Writing? Your?”

“If I had my way, I would not already be doing this,” Derek explains, in a bit of a placating voice. Like he thinks Stiles is angry. Stiles isn't, not really – he's fucking baffled?

“The press that printed Beacons is still warm.”

“I know that.” Derek nods.

“You're still selling.”

“I know.”

“Do I just not get how books work?” As Stiles recalls, there was a good three years between From the Ashes and Reborn, and then maybe only two between Reborn and Back to the Flames, but still? Stiles highly doubts Derek has ever returned from fucking tour to already have his next god damn deadline. “Just what does that contract of yours look like?”

Derek gives him a bit of a look.

“I'm confused.”

“When you have a success like Beacons,” Derek starts in his explaining a simple concept that apparently you do not understand jesus christ voice, and Stiles narrows his eyes, “you have two options. Either pull back and hope you manage to stay that way for long enough to keep it up, or you push forward into the next project while people are still talking.”

“Sounds like something Lydia would say.”

“She did say it,” Derek agrees. “She isn't wrong.”

There's not much room for argument, there, and Stiles doesn't feel like arguing with Derek at the moment, but he's...sad? Maybe. Annoyed? Hurt?

He had been planning on Derek's return from the tour to be all about hanging out together and watching Netflix and eating pizza and Stiles bringing Derek french fries back from the diner because he's a freak who for some reason likes cold fries. It was going to be – you know. Him and Derek time. Sterek time. The good times. Stiles had really, really been looking forward to that.

If he's going to be writing his next book, then he's not going to have much time for that. If he has to have a finished draft in seven months, he doesn't have nearly any time to pal around with Stiles. In between finishing up Beacons promo and working on the next shit...Stiles doesn't really see where he fits much into that.

Still, though. That's just the job. This is what Derek does. Stiles told himself to accept that when they first got together, and he thought that he had. So, then, he should probably fucking pull on his big boy pants and just – deal with it. If Derek has to work a lot, then Derek has to work a lot. Derek loves him. He'll find time.

“Well...” Stiles croaks, scratching at his cheek. “What's it, like, about?”

There's a brief pause, Derek freezing in his typing for a fraction of a second before starting back up again, like nothing happened. “Just some more pseudo-philosophical bullshit. You know.”

Stiles always thought that Derek was so smart, and such a genius, and this that and the other thing. He never called anything that Derek said pseudo. When he was a teenager, he thought the guy literally walked on water. Some passages Stiles still has memorized word for word, because he used to read them again and again before pressing the book to his chest and just soaking it all in.

The shittiest part about memories, Stiles recites in his head, blinking steadily at Derek's back, is that no matter if the time was good, or if it was one of the worst times of your life, the memories always sting. Lost or taken away, hidden or found, it doesn't really matter. Time does that.

Time does a lot of things. Stiles never thought that was bullshit.

He stares a bit dismally at the wall behind Derek's head for a couple of minutes, curling and uncurling his fingers, trying to decide how he feels. It would be ludicrous for him to be mad at Derek for literally just doing his job, and Stiles knows that. But would it be stupid if he was starting to feel...

Just a little ignored? Not really, not entirely, but just a little. Then again, maybe it's selfish to demand even half of Derek Hale's time, when the man already has to divide his time among so many other people.

Stiles doesn't have work today, so he pretty much is just getting ready to settle into the couch for a long day of watching Derek be an artist – which, when the art is words and not paintings or sculptures or something built, is not that fucking interesting honestly – when Derek finally talks to him again.

“Are you ever going to put clothes on?” His neck is bent over his work, but Stiles can tell that he's starting to wind down.

Startled, Stiles glances down at his bare chest, the sheet curled around the rest of his naked body. “Whoops. I forgot.”

“Are you going to?”

“Most likely not,” he glances at the ticking clock that tells him it's past one in the afternoon. “Fuck it. It's a no clothes day, at this point.”

Stiles notices the exact moment that Derek working goes down the fucking tubes. He's sat in here watching Derek work quite a bit, of course, way back at the start, and he's learned some things about how Derek, at least, compiles his stuff. He gets sort of into zen modes with it, where he can write fifteen thousand words in a single sitting, glugging quad-shot hold-the-foam eight pumps of vanilla lattes and acting like Stiles is just a piece of furniture waiting somewhere behind him. Probably, while Stiles was asleep on the couch, he got into that.

But once the zen is cracked. If a particularly interesting text comes through, or if he gets bribed with food, or if Stiles does something that's too enticing or bizarre to ignore, he's out of it for the time being. It's weird how his mind works. When Stiles gets distracted, it's not that hard for him to get back to it, but from the way Derek looks at his word document after his zen-mode is over, you'd think he suddenly forgot how the English language like, works.

Either way, Stiles has learned to recognize the break down of the zen as well as anything else about Derek. His shoulders bunch up, his typing slows down, and he squints down at one of his post-it's sort of like what the fuck am I talking about?

“I don't even have any more clothes here, honestly,” Stiles yawns, stretching his arms above his head. “You ripped mine up last night. Remind me to update the Stiles Drawer.” The Stiles Drawer being a spot in Derek's closet where all of Stiles' things that he leaves around wind up. At the moment, Stiles thinks there's a spare phone charger, a small stack of books, an extra uniform shirt for work, and one of his pillows from home resting in the darkness of Derek's closet. Normally, Stiles has clothes there as well, but he'd cleared most of it out when Derek left for his trip.

Finally, Derek stops typing, and turns around. Stiles is literally just sitting there, sort of awkwardly he would think – hair a mess, teeth unbrushed, unshowered and still vaguely covered in grease from work the night before and mint flavored lube from the rest of the night before.

The super, super gross thing about werewolves that Derek doesn't write about (because it's super, super gross) is that they sort of like shit like that. Stiles honest to god thinks that Derek thinks Stiles is his most attractive when he hasn't bathed. It's something about scent or pheromones or hair grease or something.

As such, it's not so much a surprise to Stiles when Derek gives him a heated once-over, dropping his hands down onto his knees. “Why don't you come here?”

Teasingly, Stiles smirks and leans back into the couch like he's set up camp here. “I thought you were writing the great American novel.”

Derek's eyes flash.

“I wouldn't want to distract you from your work.”

“Come here, Stiles.”

“I feel much more comfortable on the couch.”

He grins, his full set of teeth out on display like he's enjoying the game. “Seems a little cold over there. It's a lot warmer over here.”

“Christ,” Stiles rolls his eyes, pulling the sheet off the bottom half of his body and rising into a standing position. “Has anyone ever told you that you are the worst at dirty talk?”

“You, about a hundred times since we met.”

Derek is bad at dirty talk when he tries to be good at it. He's pretty fucking good at it when he stops trying so hard, though. Stiles has learned that out of all the times that Derek's mouth gets nearly as good as his books, there's nothing more eloquent than when they're fucking.

Stiles pads across the fine rug to where Derek is waiting for him, quirking his lips up into a half smile. “It's way colder over here.”

Once Stiles is within his reach, Derek grabs him by the hips and tugs him down into his lap so Stiles' knees are straddling his thighs. Stiles leans back against Derek's desk, as far from Derek as he can get, and raises his eyebrows.

Derek's hand trails up and down Stiles' bare stomach, again and again, and Stiles arches into the touch, trying to stretch his body out so that Derek's fingers wind up going someplace much more interesting. “You're so fucking distracting.”

“Whoops,” Stiles breathes, letting Derek rub his thumb along the head of his dick. “Sorry.”

For a few seconds, Stiles enjoys one of Derek's patented handjobs; for some reason, for whatever fucking reason whatsoever, the most common thing for Derek to do when they're like this is stroke him off. Don't even bother asking Stiles why – it's some kind of complex with him. This time, though, he freezes his hand when Stiles tries thrusting up into the touch, slides it up to Stiles' neck and squeezes with just the barest amount of pressure. There are still marks, there, from last night, when Derek had bitten him and sucked hickeys so many times Stiles started thinking he was going to be a walking Derek Bruise by the morning, so the squeeze hurts in just the right way. All it does is remind him that he's got Derek all over him.

“Let me fuck you,” he says, bringing his thumb up to trace the line of Stiles' lips.

“Hmmm...” Stiles brings his index finger up to tap his chin in mock-thought. “Persuade me.”

Derek beams at him, like he loves that Stiles is this sarcastic little shit with a clever mouth and an annoying habit of being, well, annoying. From the way Derek looks at him, Stiles would think that he himself hung the moon up in the sky. “I'll make you come.”

“Bought and sold, my friend.” Stiles stretches his arm out behind himself to paw around for the handle of the drawer where he knows from past experiences that a bottle of lube is sitting and waiting for them. When Stiles had first discovered this, he had laughed in Derek's face like what, do you jerk off to your own writing or something? Derek rolled his eyes, but he didn't exactly say no. Stiles still fucking laughs about that, honestly.

Once Stiles has it in his hand, Derek is taking it away from him and popping the cap open, reaching into his own pants to free himself to the open air. Stiles takes it upon himself to start trying to turn himself around on Derek's lap, struggling with his long limbs – he nearly goes topping down to the ground with a squawk, but Derek catches him easily with a steadying hand on Stiles' hip. They somehow manage, with Stiles using the edge of the desk and one of Derek's shoulders for leverage, to get him turned around until Stiles is facing is the laptop and resting his palms on the top of the desk.

While Derek is screwing around back there with fingers and lube and Stiles is squinting against the cold of it inside him, he takes note of the fact that Derek had closed out the word document before Stiles came over. Which is a little weird, because Derek has never once been bashful about sharing his work with Stiles before. For Christ's sake, even when the subject matter made Stiles' cheeks go hot, Derek didn't seem to have that much of a problem with letting Stiles look. Figuring he was just finished for the day or something, Stiles drops it.

“God,” Derek hisses. “No wonder the book is selling so god damn well.”

“Huh?” Stiles murmurs, a little distracted.

The fingers slide out and then, half of them wet and making Stiles scrunch his face up with what's touching his skin right now, fix themselves to Stiles' hips to pull him back to where Derek needs him to be. The head of him pushes in and Stiles sighs, leaning onto his elbows over the desk. “I describe what this is like,” Derek explains in a rush.

“Not explicitly,” Stiles interrupts, glancing over his shoulder. Derek has a look of concentration on his face as he finishes pushing all the way in, and when he meets Stiles' eyes, he doesn't even smile. He just stares for a second.

Thrusting in once, then twice, Derek says, “I couldn't find the right words.”

“If you had I wouldn't have let you put it out,” Stiles' cheeks heat up at the compliment, or at least he takes it as one – Derek the best selling wordsmith couldn't find the words to describe what being so close to Stiles is like. It can't be anything less than a compliment.

Derek sighs a laugh, and then they're just fucking. It's always so easy, with Derek. Stiles curls his fingers along the edge of the desk and pants, and Derek is silent. Most times, he is, and Stiles would take it the wrong way, but he knows what Derek's fucking face looks like when they're at it. And it's this adoring, blissed out, vulnerable expression that Stiles has only ever seen when they're like this. And Stiles has seen a lot of Derek's expressions – in candids, on television, in photoshoots. Nothing comes close to that. Stiles wonders if anyone, any of his past lovers, have ever seen it. He hopes not.

Halfway through, Derek starts running his nails up and down Stiles' back, again and again, leaving behind raised red marks, Stiles is sure. It feels good, and Stiles arches back into the touch – a move that makes Derek growl under his breath.

“Tell me you fucking missed this,” he prompts harshly, thrusting hard enough to make Stiles cry out. “Tell me you thought about this.”

Ever the little shit, Stiles tosses his head over his shoulder and challenges, “tell me you jerked off to page 436 of Beacons.”

“You fucking know the page number,” Derek's laugh is stunted by the pace he's setting, but it's there all the same. Of course Stiles knows the page number. He remembers reading that page and nearly turning into a tomato at the thought of people reading that shit. But, he didn't mark it to be taken out. Part of him felt smug about it, like he wanted people to know. He doesn't want them to see, he doesn't want all the details out there, he doesn't want pictures of videos circulating.

But those words, on page 436. That's fine, with him. Let people use their imaginations. It'll never come close to the real fucking thing, either way.

“God, I -” Derek grips Stiles' hips firmly and uses them to slam Stiles' body down on top of him. “I need you.”

“You're in me,” Stiles reminds him breathlessly.

“It's not enough.” And, fuck, Stiles knows what he means. He gets it when Derek wraps his arm around Stiles' mid section and pulls him flush against his chest, and he gets it when Derek presses his cheek against Stiles' back and just hisses his breaths out against Stiles' bare skin as if he's just trying to melt into him. It's not close enough. It's never fucking close enough.

Stiles is pretty sure he's about to come so hard he'll ruin Derek's fucking laptop, but then an event occurs that nearly makes his raging hard on retract directly back into his body out of sheer horror.

The door literally bangs open, as in, Stiles thinks he's being shot at for a fraction of a second and nearly goes topping off of Derek onto the ground until Derek grabs him even tighter. Disoriented and literally pissed off, he looks over to the library door, not entirely registering what's happened yet, and – well.

Lydia Martin is just standing there. In all black, like always, staring at them. She has this fucking look on her face like this is not even remotely shocking, or alarming, which makes sense. Because she most definitely heard them the second she stepped inside the house if not long before then. But also, like – this is just a typical occurrence for her? Bursting in on people having sex at barely two in the afternoon? Derek must have been far gone enough to not have even heard her come inside, not even heard her footsteps in the hallway.

She taps one finger on her elbow, lips pursed at the sight of them, and Derek is immediately yelling at her with Stiles still plastered to his front. The actual words he's speaking are a little fuzzy, at the moment, because Stiles just can't get over it.

The thing is – Stiles' sheet is all the way across the room, he has no fucking clothes to speak of within a mile radius, and Derek isn't a very good human shield when he's just sitting there with expletives spilling out of his mouth in Lydia's direction. Lydia staring at his naked body is, for some reason, the most mortifying thing he can imagine.

Stiles does the only thing he can think to do.

He surges off of Derek's lap and crawls underneath his desk, until just his legs are sticking out awkwardly, his toes pressing against the legs of Derek's chair. He blinks owlishly up at Derek, or at least what he can see of him from this angle, as the unmitigated shock and horror begins to ebb just a bit so Stiles can actually begin to understand what they're saying to one another.

Derek is shoving his dick back into his pants, saying, “...absolutely fucking insane. There is nothing, nothing, that can't wait until Stiles has clothes on.”

“Oh, please.” She does not sound sorry. “What is he, your blushing virginal bride?” What sounds like the bracelets she always wears around her wrists ting-tinging indicates to Stiles that she's flipping her hair over her shoulder. “It's nothing I haven't seen before.”

“It's fucking disrespectful.”

“Why does she have a key?” Stiles pipes up from his place on the ground. Derek cranes his neck downward to peer at him and makes a face like don't, knowing how bad it can get when Lydia and Stiles start bitching each other out. “No. For real. Why does she have a key.”

“If I didn't have a key, the last three books would have never gotten finished. Writers are nothing if they don't have somebody keeping them in line and on track.” She pads forwards until Stiles can see her sensible oxfords and her ankles, the smoothness of her perfectly toned calves. “Obviously, that person isn't you, Stiles.”

“I -”

“I thought you and I agreed this room is a no-Stiles zone.”

Indignant, Stiles gives Derek a look. Somewhat guiltily, Derek pinches the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut, but doesn't say a damn fucking word. Not a denial.

“What?” He demands, eyes huge. “What? What?”

“He has a deadline.” As if it's the single most important and irrefutable fact of all time, she says this. Stiles squints his eyes, dropping his jaw, and glaring at Derek. “That deadline is never going to be reached if he has you around to take your clothes off every time he writes a single sentence.”

“How many fucking times...” Derek begins, his voice low and dangerous. Fighting words, he can tell. “...have I told you not to talk about him like that?”

Lydia has a tendency to talk about Stiles like he's some hooker that Derek scooped up off of a street corner somewhere, in fishnets and glittering booty shorts. Honestly, to her, he more or less is. No important family history, no good pedigree, not a werewolf, poor, self-educated. He may as well be sucking on a lollipop and twirling his hair around at all times in Lydia's eyes.

“Apologies,” she says offhand, not a hint of honesty in her tone. “I'm having a bad morning.” She purses her lips at Stiles' legs. “And it keeps getting worse.”

Incensed beyond all belief, Stiles takes the plunge and sticks his head and neck out from underneath the desk to glare up at her. She's got her hair done up, but her face is clear of make up, and she honestly does look like she's having a bad morning, even before she burst in on Stiles and Derek's Live Action Sex Tape. “If I remember correctly, Beacons got finished even with my fucking naked body being a part of the equation, so?” Dare Stiles say that his naked body is part of the reason Beacons ever got finished. There's nearly an entire chapter about Stiles' skin in there, for fuck's sake.

Lydia's jaw works, and she looks to Derek, as if for back up. Derek rubs his jaw, like this conversation is taking years off of his life, and the longer Lydia glares at the side of his face, it seems like the smaller he becomes.

“You and I agreed that Stiles shouldn't be as involved.” She draws the word out harshly, flicking her eyes briefly to what she can see of Stiles before looking back to Derek.

“Stiles isn't a fucking issue.”

“Stiles is sitting right here,” Stiles snaps.

Both of them turn to look at him; Derek apologetically, Lydia blankly.

“Look. It's not personal.” Even though all of them know better, by now. It's always personal, with her. “It's business, and it's work. My ass is just as on the line as Derek's is and nobody, including you, can afford to piss off the people waiting for this shit to get done. Stay out of this room. Buy some clothes.” She smooths her hand over her skirt and turns to walk out of the room, out of Stiles' line of vision. “Matter of fact, I'll send some over.”

With those final parting words, the door slams behind her, and it's just Derek and Stiles in the silence, with the clock ticking.

Derek doesn't say anything, not for a long moment. So Stiles pretty much just starts the fuck in, even though he knows Lydia is most likely still listening.

“You and I both agreed,” he parrots in a mockery of her voice, “that Stiles shouldn't be as involved?”

Derek glares at the floor, rubbing his face.

“Because I really ruined it, last time, huh?”

“It's not like that,” he insists, shaking his head. Stiles starts trying to crawl out from under the desk, with the clear intent of beelining it out of the room, but Derek boxes him in with his legs to stop him. “Stiles, it's not like that. It's just like Lydia said. It's – it's not even really about you. It's about me, okay? I'm the one with the problem.”

Stiles sets his jaw. He can't contend with what Derek and Lydia say gets in the way of Derek's writing. “You said you weren't going to let her do shit like that anymore.”

“I know,” Derek says even before the words are entirely out of Stiles' mouth. “When it comes to you and I, I'm not going to let her. The book shit is separate.”

Stiles gestures towards the door as if Lydia is still standing there. “Uh – she just literally burst the fuck in on us having sex and then mocked me for two minutes?”

“I know. I'll talk to her. I'll take care of it. She was just...”

“Making sure I'm not being an evil temptress determined to ruin your career,” Stiles finishes for him, narrowing his eyes.

Rolling his eyes back into his head with a frustrated growl, Derek throws his hands in the air. “It won't happen again, all right? I don't want to god damn argue with you, I can't with that. Just -” he reaches out and squeezes Stiles' shoulder, once. “I don't want to fight with you. I know my life is fucking insane and it's a lot to deal with but I can't – I can't argue with you.”

Stiles knows that being in Derek's life is, for himself, quite a bit to deal with. He knew that going into it in the abstract sense, but experiencing it in the concrete...he never could have prepared himself for this. Not one second of it. What's important for Stiles to remember, though, is that he's really only getting a taste of it. Derek fucking lives this, and has for years, every last second of it. The entire confection of bullshit and celebrity and money and people breathing down his neck and telling him what to do and how to act. Stiles thinks he would go fucking insane if people treated him that way. Hell, he's already going insane getting morsels of it from Lydia. And she's really just doing her job, albeit in the most annoying way possible.

In that sense, Stiles feels like he just can't pile anything else on. Arguing with Derek about this will get him nowhere; he has the deadline, he has to reach it, any means necessary. Period. People's jobs are on the line.

With a sigh, Stiles leans into Derek's touch. “So, what?” He starts glumly. “I'm not allowed in here?” Like he's a little kid blowing bubbles and tugging at Derek's sleeves, or something.

Derek's lips pull up at the corners. “I've got work to do.” He says this like it's all the explanation in the world, and Stiles guesses it is.

“You initiated the sex,” Stiles accuses with no real venom. Derek doesn't argue that, just breathes out through his nose and works his fingers through Stiles' hair to untangle the mess it still is. “What is this book even about? Since it's so god damn important?”

Derek's fingers hesitate briefly, his mouth forming a frown before he can stop it. “I'll tell you when I figure it out, myself.”

****

 _Love, I thought. Love fixes every thing. For just one fleeting moment I conveniently forgot about the fact that love is what got me to this point to begin with. That love is why I wound up alone and wrecked, love is why I have nightmares, love is why I wake up in the middle of the night still thinking I smell smoke. I forgot. Just for a second. I might live with that regret the rest of my life. He's no different. I thought he would be. Were my mother here, she'd be so disappointed with what I've done. (Untitled manuscript, Derek Hale pg. 2)_  
****

Erica nearly chokes on her grilled cheese sandwich, thrusting her hand in the direction of the television playing on quiet in the diner. Stiles wheels around to get a look at it, thinking that some emergency news report is going to come on announcing a horrible tragedy down the street, but instead, he sees the profile of Derek's face. He's nodding up and down, eyes trained on whoever it is he's talking to in concentration.  
“It's your boy,” Erica says without a hint of irony, and Stiles sighs with a small smile. It is. “Turn it the fuck up, I wanna hear what he has to say for himself.”

Stiles leans up and prods the volume button, and Derek's voice gets louder and louder, until they can make out the words he's saying clearly. “...important to write about.”

“I thought it was interesting -” the camera pans over to the woman who's interviewing him. She looks familiar to Stiles, but he can't place her name, at the moment. Just another one of the many television personalities they're all supposed to care about, these days. “...how you willingly wrote about that. Unless it wasn't willing.”

“It was willing,” Derek says with a smile that Stiles has learned to recognize as fake. “It's not even the most private thing I've ever written about. People keep acting so surprised, but I don't get that.” It's incredible, really incredible, how trained and primed Derek is for these interviews. In person, if someone were to ask Derek the same shit, he'd roll his eyes and take a shot of something before snarling a mean comment and sauntering off.

“You never wrote about Jennifer Blake.”

Derek's jaw ticks. That question wasn't meant to be asked. “Some people aren't interesting enough to waste sentences on.” Stiles can only hope that wherever Jennifer fucking Blake is, she's roasting alive from that public burn on national television. Derek's never said much even to Stiles about what Jennifer was like, even less so about what Kate was like, but at least Kate was written in books and immortalized. Jennifer is some weird blip in Derek's past. He just doesn't talk about her. Gets angry and uncomfortable if you try to bring it up with him. “It's different.”

Sensing the tension, the woman across from him shifts in her seat and gives the camera a smile. “I've heard that it was very last second, that you got those last a hundred pages in. That's what everyone calls it – the last one hundred pages. It's almost like a book all on its own.”

Derek laughs. “Yeah it was – it was incredibly last second. But I wasn't going to put a book out if it wasn't an accurate depiction of what my life was turning into.”

“And what is your life turning into?”

Pause, Derek wringing his hands together. He licks his lips. “Every thing I ever wanted it to be.”

“He's really this much of a sap?” Erica interrupts so Stiles has to turn around and look at her. “He does not seem like he'd be that way.”

“He's a little sappy,” Stiles says with a slow smile. “Just not quite so in your face with it, normally.” Normally, Derek is more reserved in person. He can't afford to be reserved and standoffish on camera, however, and he's probably literally screaming on the inside about having to be so candid.

“So, then, you had to write about Stiles Stilinski.”

“I was going to write about him whether I published or not,” he shrugs, scanning the crowd briefly. “Important people have to be written down. I've always felt like that.”

“It's interesting that you use that word important,” she pulls her lip glossed lips into a bright grin and tilts her head to the side. “Because he's not just your boyfriend. Is he?”

Stiles glances away from the screen momentarily, his face going hot. Sometimes, Stiles is used to Derek talking about him like this, and other times, it still feels like it's the very first time. “He's my mate. It's half of why I knew I had to write about him, because when I put my first book out, it was to sort of – ah – call attention to how bullshit – excuse me – the stereotypes about werewolves are. I think that most humans have no idea of what werewolf mating is like and they don't...get it. At all.”

She taps her fingers against her chin. “I don't get it, either.”

“Then you weren't reading carefully enough.”

Commercial break, and Erica sighs wistfully. “You literally live a fairytale.”

“Oh, yeah,” he gestures to his diner, his fucking domain, and smirks. “A real Princess Fairytale in here, burgers and ketchup stains and all.”

She gives him a look. “It's not Derek's fault you're a stubborn little shit. He would have you set up in a mansion in Catalina if you even so much as fucking asked.” Pausing, she scrutinizes his face for a minute. “I guess when you really care about someone, you don't capitalize on their affection for you just to get something out of it.”

Stiles wonders how long it took for Erica to finally come to that conclusion, to finally realize what it was that he and Derek have been doing this entire time. Back when it first started and Stiles and Erica were still dicking around at McDonald's, every thing was different. Stiles believed that he should've been sucking Derek's money up, because why not? There was nothing else to do.

Things are different now. Stiles is different now. Erica, too, he guesses.

“Still, though.” She twirls her spoon in her lukewarm tomato soup, resting her cheek in her fist. “Having some world reknowned author writing about you like you're a fucking goddess, or something. The way he writes about you – do you ever -” Stiles has rarely, rarely seen Erica flustered, but she seems it now; lowering her eyes and pursing her purple lips together. “...what's that like?”

Erica wants to fall in love, and she wants someone to think of her like Derek thinks about Stiles. Everyone wants that. Everyone wants paragraphs, or poems, or songs, or stanzas, or movies, or something to be about them. And, why not? Who wouldn't want Derek Hale to write about them?

“I don't know,” Stiles says honestly. “There's like, not the words for what it's like.”

“Derek could probably come up with some,” she says, smiling at him. Derek can come up with the words for anything. “But, one thing that I find kind of...” she leans back, and makes a face – wide eyed, teeth clenched together, like she's a Halloween mask, “...about it all. Like – mates? Being with someone forever? That's...”

“Until you're in the situation it sounds insane,” Stiles says quickly, wiping down the counter with a rag just for something to do with his hands. “I used to think it was nuts, too, but now that I'm with him.” He doesn't finish the sentence.

“Now that you're with him you're all sure that you're never going to doubt it.”

Stiles thinks about how he sometimes flips through the pages of Derek's books, and thinks about how those words are forever, and long after Derek is gone they'll be printed and reprinted with editor's notes, maybe read in some college level course about werewolves, and maybe used in psychology of prejudice classes, and Derek's going to leave a mark. And that's forever.

And he thinks about the fact that he really can't imagine it. “I don't even think about doubting it,” he says in a low voice.

“God that's romantic.” She taps her spoon against her bowl, shaking her head. “Can I have some more of this? Is that extra? I only have quarters to pay with, by the way.”

****

“Pizza is getting cold,” Stiles calls at top volume from his spot on the bedroom floor – the part of it right near Derek's dresser that switches from carpet over to hardwood. Derek isn't one of those people who obsess over their carpets or anything, but Stiles thinks it's reasonable that he has a no food on the carpeting rule. Absolutely and totally fair, considering last time Derek bent the rules for him, Stiles spilled sweet and sour sauce all over himself and the floor around him. The carpet still vaguely smells like the stuff, even though Derek's had it cleaned about three times since then.  
He pokes at the Chinese food boxes as well, stomach grumbling. “The noodles are getting cold, too!” Picking up a paper plate and then depositing it in his lap, empty and foodless, he sits there gazing at the food longingly with huge eyes. He's been sitting here for ten minutes, criss cross on the ground. Ten minutes ago Derek said he'd be right there.

Stiles taps his knee up and down, glares at the pizza box steaming still.

It's been three months since Beacons was released, two months since Derek started writing book five (still untitled, or so Derek says), and Stiles has gotten used to calling Derek's name again and again to come out of his god damn library and spend some time with Stiles. Don't get Stiles wrong. They still go out, still spend probably around the same amount of time together that they used to, but Stiles has always preferred staying in to going out, especially when it comes to Derek. Because Derek always acts so differently in public than he does when it's just them, and Stiles prefers the Derek he gets when they're alone.

But, lately, whenever they're in Derek's house, Derek is locked away writing that book. Stiles doesn't resent it, but he's fucking hungry. The food is getting cold, god dammit.

Finally, after what feels like half an hour, Derek pads into the room in bare feet and gives Stiles an eye roll. “You don't have to wait for me to start eating,” he comments when Stiles literaly shoves half a piece of pizza the second Derek is within his line of sight. “I've told you that before.”

“What?” Stiles snorts around a mouthful. “So I can sit here in the dark -” he hiccups, nearly chokes, “-eating by myself like I'm your wife and that book is your secretary you've been screwing behind my back?”

“Where you get this imagination from, I have no fucking idea.” He plops himself down right next to Stiles on the floor so they're shoulder to shoulder, picks up the noodles and the plastic fork that came along with them.

“You and I have not been together long enough for me to eat by myself in my pajamas,” Stiles continues once he's swallowed, reaching for his second slice already. “That's, like, fifth year anniversary shit.” He pauses, wiping some tomato sauce off of his face. “When even is our anniversary?”

Derek makes a thoughtful noise before swallowing. “First time we had sex, I thought.”

“I thought we were doing it by when we actually got together,” he draws the term out long and loud, emphasizing it like it's way more important than it is. “Which was in...”

“March.”

Stiles blinks. It's November, now. “You owe me a card.”

Twirling his noodles around on his fork, Derek rolls his eyes again.

“How far along are you, anyway?”

“Three hundred pages, give or take.” Derek always says that whenever giving a progress report – give or take. Stiles has never understood quite what Derek's editing process is, but if he's learned anything, it's that his first draft is around seven hundred pages long, and he spends the following three months whiddling it down to, on average, four hundred. Stiles remembers trying to cut single paragraphs out of word-limited papers in high school – he cannot fucking fathom what it's like cutting out three hundred pages worth of material. “Good progress.”

Three hundred pages in two months, another three hundred pages by four months, the final one hundred by five months, two months spent editing it before sending it off for review. Jesus Christ. Stiles wonders if he'll even be able to manage that. “Are you ever going to tell me what it's about?”

Derek spears a broccoli tree a little too forcefully, so the plastic of the fork nearly goes shooting through the bottom of the container. “Yeah, I'll tell you. It's just a little -”

“What? Complicated?” Stiles jokes, munching into some crust. “Is it dark, or what?”

Derek gets a very, very odd look on his face. Stiles can't say that he's ever rightly seen that exact expression before, but there it is. Somewhere crossed between nervous, absolutely petrified, and angry. He swallows very deliberately, and then slowly drops the container down on the ground before lifting his eyes to meet Stiles'. “I've been meaning to tell you something,” he says evenly.

For lack of anything better to do, Stiles squints his eyes and turns his head to the side. “Okay...” he starts. Because that does not fucking sound good.

He runs his hand across his forehead, Derek's classic stressed out move, and blinks a few times in tandem. “The book – it's – I'm a nonfiction author.”

“So I've been told,” Stiles says.

“This time around, they thought it would behoove me to kind of...” he thrusts his hands out in a gesture that's supposed to mean something, but that Stiles doesn't understand. “If I were to move away into more -” he pauses abruptly, cutting off mid-sentence and squinting his eyes off into the distance. He cocks his head like a dog listening to a high pitched whistle, and drops his jaw.

“What?” Stiles asks, looking all around himself for what Derek could be focusing in on. “What is it?”

Derek blinks, shakes his head almost incredulously, and says, “my sister is here.”

Stiles freezes. He's got an entire wad of pizza rolling around in his mouth, and he just freezes.

From March to November, Stiles and Derek have been very seriously together. For Christ's sake, he's in the fucking book. Stiles has met Kira and Boyd from Derek's pack, he's met the editors, the publishers, Lydia, Lydia's fucking creepy boyfriend, and that about does it for Derek's contacts.

Except for Laura Hale. Who Stiles has never met.

There have been about a dozen or so excuses each time – like, on Derek's birthday, it was that she couldn't fly out because of the weather. And, on Stiles' birthday, she was in Maui on a bender and lost track of time. Lost her passport, had a bought of genius and is now a painter and can't leave her muse, had another bought of genius and wants to make movies and can't abandon her cast, and on and on and on.

Because of this, Stiles has a very interesting picture of Laura Hale in his head. He knows what she looks like, from pictures that Derek has scattered around his house and the very few paparazzi shots people have managed to get of her. He knows that she looks like Derek if Derek were feminine and skinny, and taller, somehow, and he knows that she has tattoos, and he knows that she apparently can't hold a job any longer than she can hold a phone conversation.

So, pretty much, if Derek had any family left to speak of, Laura would be the one that would show up at Thanksgiving dinner drunk with a brand new bearded boyfriend and some new tattoo of a tiger on her back. That's how Stiles has started thinking about her. It's not like he had much to go on.

All the same, when Derek rises into a standing position, Stiles glares down at himself with wide eyes. “Like, she's here here?”

“She's in the driveway,” he clarifies, moving like he's going to head down to open up the door for her, let her past security.

“Um!” Stiles waves the reaminder of his pizza slice in the air. “I'm in my pajamas?” Even if Laura is the last person anyone should care about trying to impress, Stiles wants to impress her. Fuck up or not, she's Derek's sister. The only living family he has. It feels fucking imperative that he not be in his spongebob boxers, ratty white t-shirt, and bath robe when he meets her.

“She's not a very judgmental person,” Derek mutters, heading out the door.

“Not the -” Stiles calls after him, but he's already vanishing. “Not the point!”

Stiles grumbles under his breath, takes one last bite of his pizza, and leaps up to put on some god damn clothes. Luckily for all of them, he finally updated the Stiles Drawer, so he at least has clean jeans and a t-shirt to throw on. He runs his hands through his hair, tugs down on his shirt a zillion times, and takes a deep breath.

Derek is great. So Laura has to be great. They were both raised in the same household, both went through the same things; Stiles tries not to think about all the times Derek has said that his sister did not grow up to be – well. To be a real functioning adult, pretty much. She was eighteen when the fire happened, and apparently, went absolutely buckwild after the fact. Derek doesn't write about it.

When he climbs down the staircase and hears a feminine voice speaking, followed by Derek's monotone, he takes another deep breath. An entire eight months of being with someone and never even meeting their family can give a person some nerves. Like, what if she absolutely hates him like Lydia does, or wants him gone, or tries to claw his face off. What if she's, like, high or drunk right now and completely off her rocker, what if she's this, and what if she's that.

Either way, he steps out into the kitchen, scratching nervously at his cheek, and finds the two of them standing there. When he enters the doorway, both of them turn at the same time and observe him – Derek with a small smile on his face, and Laura with a calculating stare.

She's tall. He already knew that, but to see her standing even just a mere two inches taller than Derek is – well. She's fucking tall. She's tall, and she's got on a white tank top so her arm tattoos are on full display and flying color, and skin tight jeans, and her dark hair is thrown up into a messy ponytail like she just climbed off of an airplane. Judging from the pack of peanuts she's picking at in her hand, Stiles would say that's accurate.

“You already know, but this is Stiles,” Derek says, gesturing to him and taking Laura's shoulder to guide her over for a meet and greet.

“Right,” Laura smiles – not a smirk or a smug grin or a leer, but a genuine smile. A good sign. “Your sun, your moon, your stars, or whatever the hell.” Once she's within distance, she's sticking her long-fingered hand out, and Stiles smiles back at her.

He observes the snake tattoo on the inside of her wrist before taking her hand, and when he meets her eyes, they seem kind. “It's really nice to meet you,” he says, clearing his throat. “I've heard uh – a lot.”

Laura scrunches her nose up and laughs. “I bet you have,” she nudges him like they're in on a joke together, and Stiles staggers a bit with the strength of it. “Whoops, sorry. I don't hang around a lot of humans, I forget they topple over like sticks in the wind. I've been spending the past five months in this camp down in Alaska where it's all werewolves and we, like, hunt moose and shit. Fun stuff, but, I started to miss clothes.”

Stiles stares at her, then at Derek, and closes his mouth, because it's hanging open. This is not Derek 2.0. Not in the least fucking bit.

“I left, like, right before the book came out,” she starts to explain, looking directly at Stiles, her full attention solely on him. It makes him feel a little uncomfortable, and he smiles tightly and glances at Derek as if for help. “I read it on the plane.”

“Oh. So you just -” Stiles stutters, and again looks to Derek. But he's just standing there, a smile on his face, arms crossed, looking fine and comfortable.

“I just read the last one hundred pages, yeah. Like an hour ago.” Ah, the famous last one hundred pages. Stiles scratches at his face again and can't think of anything to say, so he doesn't say anything. A rare thing, for him.

Finally, she turns her gaze to Derek and rubs her knuckles into his arm, before wrapping her own arm around his neck. “It's a really god damn good book, Derek. How much has it sold, now? Six billion?”

“Eight million,” Derek corrects with a smile, ducking his head.

“Eight million,” she repeats incredulously. She turns back to Stiles with her arm still around Derek's shoulders, and for a second, Stiles feels incredibly like a fucking third wheel. “Isn't he brilliant? I remember when he used to write those bullshit novellas about girls he liked in school. I used to take the shit out of him for those.”

“Who's laughing now,” Derek teases, and it's so god damn normal and familial that Stiles nearly can't believe it. The way Derek always talked about Laura, the way Laura as a phantom figure was always presented to him...

He can still kind of see around the edges that she's sort of wild, that she's never in one place for long, and he's positive that in under a week she'll be on another plane going somewhere else, leaving nothing behind but a jacket hung on a hook somewhere in the mansion. But all the same. She's not a drug addict and she seems to have absolutely no problems with Stiles so...yay? Not the worst case scenario, bare minimum.

“Anyway, it's only eight o'clock,” she comments, glancing at a watch on her wrist. “Hamburgers? A hundred dollar steaks? Derek's buying.”

****

Laura downs her champagne in one gulp and then reaches for Stiles' when he leaves it out sitting just a second too long. He doesn't stop her – after all, he's not the one paying for it, and Derek doesn't look all that put out when she immediately waves her finger in the air for another round. Derek has taken them to the lounge that stays open until two in the morning like a bar does, except it's for rich people who wear pant suits and gold jewelry when they go out to hit the town.  
Stiles feels out of place in his jeans and his t-shirt, but Laura is wearing much the same thing, and Derek only put on a polo shirt. No one's really staring. But most people in here are drunk, anyway. So they get away with it.

Laura talks a mile a minute, barely leaves any room for Derek or Stiles to say anything, and switches subjects so fast Stiles finds himself blinking and wondering how they even wound up in this topic of conversation to begin with. Which, considering who Stiles is, and considering Stiles' affinity for talking fast and near nonsensically, is a pretty big feat to accomplish. She has a million stories, like the one where she got caught in an actual bear trap and nearly had to bite her own foot off to get out of it, or the one where she got so drunk in the woods somewhere she slept on a rock and nearly drowned in the river, or the one where she held a baby squirrel in her hands. Apparently Alaska was good to her.

She asks Derek about Beacons, about how the success is going, and then asks Stiles if he ever gets annoyed by people knowing who he is now, and then jumps into a three minute long rant about personal privacy, followed by a five minute rant on wishing the paparazzi would use instagram filters sometimes so her skin would look nice in a picture for once.

She drinks a lot, ties and unties her hair again and again, and in general exudes an air of energy that Derek just...doesn't. Derek's energy is there, but it's always been more calming, relaxing. Even when he gets fucking angry, Stiles wouldn't say that he's loud. Laura is, though. She's practically bursting with loud. Derek and Laura may look alike, but that's just about where the similarities end. Stiles finally understands what Derek had said to him about his sister the first time they had a real conversation together, even beyond just the fact that she was a partyer and he was the one who had to take care of it all the time.

Laura may be the older sibling, but she's not the caretaker between the two of them. She's the one who does stupid shit, and Derek's the one who listens to the stories while cleaning up the messes she's made. She might not be the absolute and utter disaster Stiles had imagined, and she's nice and funny and ineresting, but she's...a lot. He catches Derek's eyes every now and again in between Laura's talking, and he can tell that Derek is wondering what Stiles thinks about her. Honestly, Stiles isn't exactly sure, himself.

Stiles excuses himself to use the restroom halfway through his first drink (Laura is hitting drink number four or five at this point, Stiles has lost count), and Derek nods his head and points his finger in the direction of where it would be.

Right as he's about to walk through the door, a bony hand grabs him by the arm and pushes him gently back against the wall. Stiles meeps, half expecting one of Derek's fabled attackers to be standing in front of him with a knife held against his neck demanding thirty thousand dollars for Stiles' safe return, but instead finds – Laura. Smiling at him.

“Whoa,” she says, releasing him and putting her hands in the air in the universal sign of I come in peace. “Startle much?”

Heartbeat regulating back to normal, Stiles lets out a breath and narrows his eyes. “Sneak up on people, much?”

“I'd have called your name,” she starts, flicking a piece of imaginary lint off her shoulder, “but I don't want Derek listening in to this conversation.” She pauses momentarily, cocking her head to the side. “Right now he's answering an e-mail. I think we're safe to talk.”

For a moment, Stiles really thinks that Laura is going to curse him out, or something. Tell him he's not good enough for Derek, that he's human trash, that Derek should be with someone more like him, that Derek is brilliant and Stiles is a failure. It's all anyone from Derek's world has ever said to him or treated him like, after all, so honestly, he doesn't even know if it would be that much of a blow.

But, Laura keeps smiling genuinely at him, dimples popping up in her cheeks. “My brother gets weird about me talking to his whatevers.”

Stiles nods.

“I wasn't allowed to talk to Jennifer, which – huh. Maybe that was for the best because I'm sure I would've literally eaten her,” she shrugs, like this admission is nothing to her. Stiles wonders how many animals she's killed with her bare hands. “And his other short lived flings probably weren't even worth my time.”

“Where are you going with this?” Stiles asks, nervously flicking his eyes down the hallway towards the main room where Derek is waiting. She follows his eye line, and then smiles.

“He's not listening. Look, I'm not trying to attack you -”

Stiles holds his arms up to the situation – Laura boxing him in against the wall, Laura being a werewolf four inches taller than him, Laura standing dangerously close to him, the dark fucking hallway they're lurking in. She raises her eyebrows and tips her head, like touche. She takes a step back, and crosses her arms over her chest.

“I just wanted to talk to you. The thing is, I like you,” she looks him up and down, smiles again. “I liked what I read about you in the book, and I like you in real life, too. You seem like a decent person. Maybe you've noticed Derek has a hard time finding decent people to put in his life.”

She's not wrong about that. A role call of people that Derek has been close to in the past ten years would go something like evil, bad, murderer, backstabber, liar, and on, and on, and on.

“Because I like you, I'm going to give you a heads up.”

His heart stutters briefly, and he tilts his head to the side with a squint.

“My brother – he has this pretty surprising ability to fuck things up. It's, like, a spectacular talent of his, I think.”

Blinking, confused at where the conversation is going, Stiles says, “I thought writing was his big, spectacular talent.”

She laughs, light and carefree. “Writing is, ultimately, just the product of all of his mistakes. You know – he fucks up, he writes about it. I really think that he gets off on having shit stories to tell, because at least they're stories.”

Stiles has honestly never heard anyone talk about Derek like this. Like he's not, actually, the sun or something. But like he's a normal person who has normal experiences and makes normal mistakes like any other person. It's a little bit alarming to hear, actually, especially since she's just standing there looking casual as all get out.

“My point is, he's a fuck up. Through and fucking through. It's a compulsion. I'm allowed to say this because I'm his sister, and I got him his fake ID when he was seventeen – don't let the money, and the charm, and the books fool you. The man literally exists to sabotage himself.”

With a confused twist to his mouth, Stiles stares at her. It's funny, really funny, that Stiles has spent nearly the entire time that he's known Derek Hale genuinely believing that the two siblings were fire and ice, wind and sea, one great and the other not so much. And, of course, Derek was the good one, and Laura the bad. Derek the superstar, the success, the smart one, and Laura the nobody, the failure, the fuck up.

To hear it twisted around and flipped on its head like this, Stiles almost doesn't know what to god damn believe. “Why are you telling me this?” He demands, in a low voice.

She takes a step closer to him, leaning down just slightly to look directly into his eyes despite how close they are. “I have it on a kinda strong suspicion that you're the best thing that's ever happened to him.” A strange, solemn smile finds its way across her face. “He won't be able to resist a crash and burn. It's how he operates, whether he does it intentionally or not.”

Stiles swallows the lump in his throat. “He already fucked up with me. I think that the quota's been filled.”

A bit of a condescending look crosses her face, but she only shakes her head and raises her eyes to the ceiling. “It's all smooth sailing from here on out.” Her hands moves in the air like a boat drifting through the water, before she lets it slap down against her thigh. “I honestly hope that, for you.”

****

I just felt like I had suffered so fucking much – that I'd lost every thing and had to start all over again, building from ground zero up, to get to this point, and not a second of it was easy. I had suffered enough. And, by then, I had deserved something that didn't hurt. I guess I'd forgotten, then, what it was like to really love something. I was naive and reborn all over again with him, at first, thinking it was going to be easy from here on out. I had him, and he was made for me, and that was the end of the equation. I was stupid. I traded in one pain for another. (Spark [unpublished manuscript], Derek Hale pg. 26)  
****

“A text to my phone,” Stiles says, punching Derek's pillow again and again and again. “A voicemail reminder. A fucking alarm system. Something.” He fluffs it, unfluffs it, and then punches it again. “Just something to remind me about my pillow.”  
“It's interesting that you think I'm responsible for where your pillow goes or does not go, Stiles,” Derek drolls from beside him with is phone in his hand – poking around in his e-mail like he near constantly fucking is these days.

“You know I can't sleep without my pillow,” Stiles accuses, thrusting his head down onto the thing and growling under his breath when it just feels wrong. He lies there for a second, staring up at the ceiling, listening to Derek's fingers work along his touch screen, until he just can't stand it any longer. “That's it,” he shoots up, reaching for Derek's bedside table and pulling his keys up and off of it. “I need it. I can't do this.”

Derek grabs him by his shoulder and pulls him back down into the bed beside him, hard enough that the bedframe shakes. “Just settle. It's half mental, and you know it.”

“I guess, then, that your lucky laptop is half mental, too.”

Meeting his eyes, Derek sets his jaw – but he's almost smiling. “Explain to me how my most successful book was written mostly on that laptop, if it's not lucky.”

“Uh, because it's a good book,” Stiles lifts up his index finger, “I'm in it,” his middle finger, “what more reasoning do you need? Explain to me why I can't sleep without my god damn pillow.”

“Because you keep thinking about it,” Derek teases, patting Stiles on the head like a dog and going back to his e-mails like the conversation is over. Ten seconds of silence pass, Stiles pointedly trying not to think about how soft and fluffy and Derek-smelling this pillow is as compared to how lumpy, old, and Stiles smelling his pillow is, and then Derek is talking again. “Laura really liked you.”

Stiles nods to himself, mostly, knowing Derek won't see it. “She's cool.”

“You've been saying that about her since the first time we spoke,” he yawns, leaning back into his own side of the bed.

“My suspicions were confirmed,” Stiles evades, twisting around a bit, trying to get comfortable. “She owns a motorcycle and hunts moose. What could be cooler than that?”

Truthfully, Stiles is sitting somewhere on the fence about Laura Hale. She's cool, definitely, who could fucking deny that, and she's about a half dozen other positive adjectives – but she's also...well. Stiles can't put his finger on it. That conversation they had near the bathrooms at the lounge has been bothering him probably way more than it should be. Of course Laura said her brother was a fuck up. All sisters think their brothers are, on some level, fuck ups. It's in the sibling code of conduct.

It was just – the intensity with which she said it. The way her eyes looked like she honest to god believed what she was saying. Coupled with Derek's track record...Stiles has been thinking about it. Not in a holy shit, she's right, get out while there's still time type of a way. But more in a distant, muted, doubt kind of way.

But it's the same doubt that's been bugging him for months, now. The same doubt that he doesn't think Derek understands or gets. The human doubt. The am I making a mistake doubt. Werewolves, they mate, and it's for life. And Stiles wants that, Jesus Christ, does he want that with Derek.

It makes him nervous. Maybe he wouldn't be human, if it didn't. It's normal. That could have been all Laura meant, by what she said. Stiles just isn't sure.

“The stamp of approval from my sister is a lot like a four leaf clover,” Derek continues, finally putting his phone down on his stomach. “I know that she's a little – you know.” Uh, there aren't words to describe what Laura is a little bit of. “...but she's. My only family. So the fact that she liked you, it really...solidified all this. For me.”

Stiles pats Derek on his arm, strokes his fingers up and down his shoulder. “It was important to me that she liked me, too. I love you.”

There's a long, pregnant pause, during which Stiles flips over onto his side and spreads his limbs out into his sleeping pose, burrowing into the covers and hiding from the lamp that's still on on Derek's side of the room. Derek is silent and still for long enough that Stiles thinks they're both falling asleep, now, and he starts thinking about a grocery list for tomorrow. Eggs, he thinks, and then pumpkin puree I should make pumpkin pie, and then, Thanksgiving is in a few days Derek hasn't said if we're doing anything and I assume Laura didn't even fucking know it was Thanksgiving week from how she took off and -

Derek drapes himself over Stiles' side, and there's the distinct sound of something clicking, very close to his ear.

When he blinks his eyes open, confused, there's a box with a ring sitting in Derek's hand inches away from his face.

“You said you didn't like grand gestures,” Derek tells him in a soft voice, as Stiles just stares, and stares, and stares, heart hammering in his chest. “If I had my way, we'd be on a yacht right now with fireworks going off over our heads. But that's not you.”

Stiles turns over to look Derek right in his face, but he pointedly drags the hand holding the ring safely in its box along with them, so it stays in his line of sight. He opens his mouth to say something, anything, something romantic or clever or sarcastic or just something, but nothing comes out. For the first time in a very long time, he's been struck fucking silent.

“I'll just keep it simple,” he goes on, holding the ring out right there, for Stiles to either take or push away from him. “I'm asking you to marry me.”

Stiles knows that for him, it is a choice, and it really is a question. Derek might not positively know the answer, he might not really know what Stiles is going to say, not for sure. If Stiles were the one asking, Stiles would be certain what Derek would say. Of course, Stiles never would've been able to afford a ring that fucking nice, but honestly, he could give Derek the ring out of a crackerjacks box and Derek would think it was the most incredible thing he's ever seen.

The point is, that Stiles has a choice. A real one. But he remembers a thought he had, way back at the start – that when it comes to he and Derek, there's no if. There's only a when. And when is happening right now, right in front of his eyes. It's sooner than he thought, and it's out of fucking left field – he hadn't expected it so soon after Beacons, while Derek is still writing the mystery book. Bamboozled. That's the word to describe how he feels, right now.

Finally, he clears his throat, and says the only thing he can think of. “Do you promise to always remind me about my pillow?”

Derek's face splits out into a grin, eyes crinkling at the corners. He hears the yes hovering around somewhere in that sentence, and even Stiles can practically smell the relief and unmitigated joy radiating off of him in waves. “It's already in my vows, I swear.”

With an overly dramatic, put upon sigh, Stiles says, “then I guess I'll marry you.” He waggles his fingers, dropping the facade quickly and patting Derek's shoulder with his free hand. “Put it on me, put it on!”

Derek picks the ring out of its box as if it's a bomb that might go off, and then slides it onto Stiles' ring finger gently – either like the ring itself is delicate or Stiles' hand is. He watches as Stiles holds it up into the light, examines how it looks on his skin. Out of place, in a way, because nothing so nice has ever been worn by him before, while at the same time looking like it's been there all along. Stiles guesses that in his head, he used to imagine what it would look like, when it finally came down to it. “Do you like it?”

“It's perfect,” he says, watching how the metal catches the light. “How long have you had this?”

With a sheepish grin, Derek shrugs his shoulders. “Not long.”

Stiles eyeballs him. “Don't bullshit me.”

He raises his eyes to the sky, runs his hand along Stiles' bare arm. “Rememeber the day you asked me to sign your copy of Reborn?”

Stiles does remember that day – the first day that Stiles invited Derek over to his house, back when he still lived with his dad, and Derek saw that fucking embarrassing Stiles <3's Derek written on the inside cover. “We weren't even together then.”

“No, we weren't,” Derek agrees. “But I knew.”

“We, like, got in a huge fight literally days later,” Stiles goes on, finally looking away from the ring to give Derek a head tilt.

“I know,” Derek reiterates, smiling wider. “But I knew.”

****

“After dinner, but before dessert,” Stiles says, peering out at his father's house, the house he grew up in, was in diapers in, that his mother sang him to sleep in, that he's now sitting outside of with a god damn engagement ring on his finger, and he's got a grim look on his face. “No sooner, no later. After dinner. Before dessert.” The perfect time for dropping bombs on his dad. After he's had a big meal and is satisfied, but not before there's still more to come. So if the news is really that awful to him, he'll have some pie and ice cream to look forward to, at bare minimum. Granted, he might pick up the pie and haul it directly at Derek's head, but – at least he'll get some of his frustration out.  
“Why are you this nervous that he's going to take it badly?” Derek asks, shifting his eyes nervously between the house and Stiles.

Stiles gives him a dirty look. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” he starts in a monotone, eyebrowing Derek almost as well as Derek can eyebrow him, “but my father, capital fucking h, hates you.”

This isn't brand new information to Derek, so he just tilts his head to the side and nods slightly like, well, yeah...

The first time that Stiles brought Derek home in an official capacity instead of just climbing out of the Range Rover, instead of the Sheriff glaring in through Derek's windshield and Derek staring sardonically back, the two other men nearly came to blows. Stiles wishes he were just exaggerating. It's really odd, as a matter of fact, because he's never had this much of a negative reaction to anyone else Stiles has ever brought home. With Jackson, he just sort of sighed all put upon, fishing through the newspaper and shaking his head, muttering under his breath. With Isaac, there were actually civil handshakes and brief small talk conversations.

For some reason, with Derek, there's just something about him. Maybe it's the fact that Derek showed up that first day, and the third words out of his mouth were “I could pay to fix that, you know,” as he looked up at the dining room chandelier that was, at the time, about to fall out of its socket in the ceiling. Or maybe it's because Derek doesn't even know the fucking start of small talk, can only grunt or say something vaguely dickish and philosophical or say nothing at all, has never really had to speak to someone else's father before in this capacity.

Most likely, it's because Derek acts like Stiles' dad is sort of a non-issue. He's always acted like that. It's hard to explain, but he has this air about him, like he thinks that talking to him and seeing him is just some sort of formality he has to get through, not like it's important that the man likes him or even tolerates him at all. Literally, Derek doesn't give much of a fuck whether or not the Sheriff likes him. It translates loud and clear. No matter how many times Stiles has punched him in the shoulder, hissed be fucking nice to Derek under his breath, Derek just lifts his body upwards and holds his hands up like what? Or maybe, why bother?

Frankly, Derek's indifference to getting along with Stiles' father is his least appealing character trait.

“I can't have you being Captain Give-A-Fuck today, all right? This is Thanksgiving.” In testament to this, he holds up the pumpkin pie they baked together in the morning up between them like it's a white flag. “This is important to me. It should be important to you.”

Derek raises his eyes towards the roof of his car, inhales deeply through his nose. “I don't know how to do these things.”

Always, Stiles is always trying to be considerate of this fact. He reminds himself near constantly that family gatherings just mean empty spaces at tables and a million memories that he's never going to get back, his father examining the meat in the oven every ten minutes and his mother wrangling all his siblings, and all of that just being ghosts, now. Since then, and because of then, Derek approaches all of these things already in melancholy mode, looking entirely like he's about to slam himself away in the coat closet with his laptop to hunch down in the dark and write twenty pages about some serious fucking shit that he's trying to repress.

Stiles reminds himself of this. But today, he really can't fucking afford to just let Derek be his usual distant, cold self. In a sense, it's possible that the relationship that Derek and the Sheriff have could either go more uphill, or even further downhill, entirely depending on Derek's actions.

“I'll be there, too, you know,” he consoles, poking the edge of the pie into Derek's arm while he stares abysmally out the window. “My charming, awesome self. I'm a buffer, like – I can pad any awkward situation with incessant chatter.”

“Oh, boy,” Derek snarks, pulling the keys out of the ignition and pushing his door open all the way. “My knight in shining armor.”

Stiles climbs out and meets Derek around the front of the car, beginning their dissent into what might turn out to be the lion's den as they pass Scott and Melissa's cars, crunching through the leaves. “Don't be nervous,” Stiles goes on as the door gets closer. “Just be yourself.”

“I thought me being myself was the issue.”

“You being The Grinch Who Stole Christmas,” or whatever the Thanksgiving equivalent would be – The Turkey Who Refused to Die - “is the issue.”

“I repeat again – I thought being myself was the issue.”

“Har har,” Stiles rolls his eyes and puts his hand on the doorknob, but he chooses not to turn it just yet. Instead, he whirls around a bit, to find Derek standing there with his hands burrowed deep into his coat, staring at the brown door as if he half expects it to sprout purple wolfsbane flowers all over itself and then launch itself straight at Derek's face to smother him to death. “Aw, buddy,” Stiles half laughs, but with a true hint of empathy for Derek's plight. “Think about the cool Thanksgiving sex we're gonna have when we leave.”

Almost like it's pulled out of him by a string, Derek hacks out a surprised laugh. “What is cool Thanksgiving sex, Stiles? You in a Turkey costume?”

“Uh, yeah,” he twists the knob, winking. “With you as a hunter? Talk about hot.”

And then they're inside, and the smell of a cooking turkey and cinnamon and cheese platters and wine hits him full blast, and Derek trails behind Stiles as close as he can physically get without it being too strange. Scott bounds over to them first, a beer bottle in his hand, and then he's taking the pie away from Stiles and saying something about the game which Stiles doesn't care about and never fucking has but nods his head like he's listening.

Scott's eyes flick to Derek, the same way that they always do. With Scott, there's no real malice, or any genuine dislike, but he does sort of regard Derek as particularly unique. Almost like he half believes that Derek is a hologram, or a figment of his imagination, or that there's a projector hanging somewhere behind them that's casting a television interview of him right in front of their eyes. “Hey, Derek,” Scott greets with a lopsided grin. “You look good.”

“It's the writer's diet,” Stiles jokes, nudging Derek in the side like he is even remotely in on this instead of just being dragged headfirst down into it all. “Two packets of Hello Kitty fruit snacks a day and four sixteen ounce quad-shots.”

“Oh, right,” Scott raises his eyebrows and nods up and down. “You're writing the next book. Uh -”

“It's untitled,” Derek says in a rush, looking away to stare at a spot on the ceiling. He still hasn't taken his coat off, even though Stiles is unfurled from his scarf and is hanging it up as they speak.

From behind them, lurking somewhere in the kitchen, Stiles' dad's voice comes as though it's a disembodied fucking spirit – Derek's own personal hell demon, Stiles thinks to himself as he closes his eyes and shakes his head. “You must not be making very good progress, then.”

“Hey to you, too, Dad,” Stiles snaps pointedly, tugging on the lapels of Derek's jacket to get it off of his shoulders. With him looming there by the door, still in his coat, he looks about ready to make a break for it. Stiles almost doesn't blame him. “It's actually coming along really well, right, Derek?” It's amazing, truly amazing, that they're barely even two feet in the door, Melissa hasn't even turned her back from poking at the fireplace, and already the grilling process has started.

“Sure,” he says, a bit frostily, and Stiles elbows him hard in the gut. With a jolt, Derek sighs through his nose. “...I'm three hundred pages in.”

Stiles' father rounds the corner out of the kitchen, pulling oven mitts off of his hands and giving Derek a critical once over, like Stiles isn't even standing there. Stiles hangs up Derek's coat for him, leans into his side very deliberately like he's picking a team or something, and nods his head. “Three hundred whole pages in two months.”

“Is that good?” His dad asks, tone blank. “I don't speak bookanese.”

“Oh, yeah,” Stiles rolls his eyes. “Page numbers. A completely foreign language.”

“You know what I meant.”

“As a matter of fact, it's really good,” Stiles looks up at Derek's face and finds him looking particularly miserable. “It's really, really good. He's definitely gonna meet the deadline.”

“Really?” Like he's not impressed by this, not in the least bit, his dad says this. Derek has yet to meet his eyes, and Stiles really feels like he is currently watching the sinking of the god damn Titanic, right before his eyes. He most likely should give up on these two ever really getting along. Barely tolerating each other should be the goal. It's fucking realistic. “What's it about this time?” Stiles has heard his father rant enough times about Beacons to know that he's barely biting back the comment about not my son, I hope. To say that he was less than enthused when he got to page 436 might be...an understatement.

Just like when Stiles always asks that same exact question about Mystery #5, Derek sets his jaw and gets an odd expression on his face. “This and that.” Stiles elbows him again. “...sort of a hodgepodge of happenings.”

Hodgepodge of happenings. Stiles has to resist facepalming. “That's sure to go straight to number one,” Stiles' father says back around a barely restrained snicker, mocking, fitting an oven mitt back onto his hand like this conversation is done, now, and he's done his fatherly duty of at least acknowledging the boyfriend.

“Beacons is still number one.” He scans across the room to find Melissa looking politely pleased by this information, Scott engrossed in the game, and his father seeming like he could not give less of a fuck. This just might be the one room in all of the United States that is unimpressed by Derek Hale. Of course, it makes sense. It's the only room of people where Derek and Stiles might actually care about what they think about his work. So of course.

Stiles sighs through his nose and leans into Derek, patting him on the chest in what he hopes is at least a somewhat consoling manner. “I'm super proud,” he says mostly just to Derek, not caring if anyone else really hears. Derek scritches at the hairs at the base of Stiles' neck, before letting out a long suffering sigh and skirting past him, towards where Scott and the snacks are sitting.

“So, Scott,” he starts, surprising Scott into a wide-eyed blink. “What's the score?”

“Not good,” Scott says back with a pleased smile. Really, all Scott wants is to get along with Derek, at least. That makes one fucking person.

At the dinner table, once the turkey is carved and the spoons are dipped into their respective side dishes, things don't really thaw out. Or, they do, for everyone who isn't Derek. Scott and the Sheriff go back and forth about this that and the other thing, Stiles pipes up like he always does, and Melissa keeps piling more and more food onto Derek's plate even though he keeps saying he's had enough.

“The Hello Kitty and coffee diet might be hip, or whatever,” she smiles at him, “but you look thin. You need brain food.” Derek allows this with genuine smiles, and she seems to be the only one aside from Stiles who's getting any of that, today.

But, other than that, Derek is mostly mute silent. And, honestly, Stiles doesn't even fucking blame him. He doesn't even try dragging Derek into it anymore, by the time half the food is gone, because it's really only making things worse. He's throwing the towel in, metaphorically, on getting his father and Derek to be anything more than acquaintances. Maybe it really doesn't even matter, in the end. They're getting married whether anyone has anything to say about it, or not. People can react how they want.

That's Stiles' motto from now on. People can react how they want. He should've adopted this philosophy a long, long time ago. Who knows how much of his heartache could've been spared.

He bumps his elbow into Derek intentionally again and again, squeezes his hand underneath the table, and keeps his knee bouncing right up against Derek's thigh. It's really the best he can do in terms of anxiety management for him, right now.

“This was kind of a small gathering today,” Stiles says as soon as everyone is almost done, poking around at the last of the turkey on his plate. Derek's got his fork and knife laid criss cross over his own plate, napkin bunched up on top, leaning back into Stiles' personal space. “Where's everyone else?”

The table blinks at him for a second. “Who the hell else do we know?” Melissa asks honestly, shrugging her shoulders. Stiles guesses that he could have invited Erica; she's most likely either sitting in her shitty apartment by herself listening to emo rock and eating stuffing out of the box, or sitting alone in her shitty apartment by herself listening to emo rock and eating cranberry sauce straight out of the can. It just didn't cross his mind at the time. But, all in all, Melissa isn't really wrong. This is the The Crew, for the most part, and it has been for a very long time – save for when Scott's dad use to make phantom appearances with chocolate turkeys and constantly checking his watch. Frankly, they're all probably better off without him bringing the mood down.

“Well, what about Allison?” Stiles asks. Oho, idiotically. Stiles fucking asks this.

Scott nearly chokes on his food in his excitement to answer the question, probably even just at excitement over hearing her name. “With her own family,” he finally manages to grit out, tears in his eyes. Derek and Stiles exchange a look, silently making fun of him, before turning back to look at him in unison. “I think she has a big one, and it's important, and all that.”

“Maybe you could stop by at hers once you're done here,” Stiles waggles his eyebrows at him. “Meet the family and all.”

“I have met the family,” Scott says in a tone of voice that suggests that it was not a very good time, not in the least fucking bit. “They are...intense. I kind of felt like I was on trial, or something. I honestly don't want to go back there any time soon.”

“How bad could it have really been?” Stiles presses. “What are they, fire and brimstone religious?” A word choice that Stiles is sure will one day go down in fucking history as the single most idiotic – the single most obtuse – boneheaded -

“They just take every thing really seriously. They acted as though I was immediately trying to marry into the Argent name, or something -”

Abruptly, Derek's entire body stiffens. It's hard enough that the table sort of jerks, silverware clattering and glasses nearly spilling over. Stiles' dad grabs the edge of it to steady every thing before something bad happens, and then Stiles turns to Derek quizzically.

“Are you okay?” He asks. His face is pale, like he's seen a ghost, and he's staring at Scott as if he just fucking murdered someone right in front of his very eyes. Stiles follows his eyeline, sees nothing except for Scott blinking in puzzlement back at him, and then looks back to Derek. “Hey, what's -”

“Allison Argent.” Derek repeats the name, the full name, out loud with little to no inflection. “You're seeing Allison -”

“Er -” Scott looks to Stiles for back up, because there's a particular glint in Derek's eyes that seems...dangerous. Matter of fact, Stiles thinks the lsat time that he saw that look in Derek's eyes is when they fought outside of his party. That feral, caged animal, nearly wolfing out face.

“What -”

“Did you fucking know about his?” Derek suddenly rounds on Stiles, twisting his whole body around to glare daggers directly into his skull. Like he's done something wrong.

“I – what are you -” which is exactly when it dawns on him. He catches sight of Derek's fingers literally trembling where they're resting on the table top, either from the exertion of not shifting then and there or just from whatever memories come surging through his veins at hearing that name, Stiles isn't sure. Because suddenly, Stiles remembers. “Oh,” he draws out, and Derek gives him a betrayed look. “Oh, no, no, I didn't – I mean I knew but it didn't...” ...occur to him. It did not fucking add up as two and two in his head. Allison Argent. Kate Argent.

God, how many times has he read Derek's books, how many times has he read Kate's name written out, Argent, Argent, how many times has Scott said Allison's last name – and how many times has it just got straight over his head?

“What's going on?” Melissa asks, flicking her eyes between Scott and Derek again and again.

“I cannot fucking believe,” Derek starts in a low voice, before sitting up all the way and pushing his chair out, like he's getting up to leave. “That you would bring me here knowing full well that your best friend is fucking the blood relative of -” he can't finish the sentence. Stiles doesn't need him to. He rises up into a standing position and starts patting at his pockets, looking for his keys.

“Hey!” Stiles' dad pipes up, standing up himself – he's not taller than Derek, not stronger than him, so it's not menacing, but he tries. “Don't talk to my son like that.”

“No, Dad,” Stiles holds his hand out, right as Derek has found his keys. “It's really – it's my fault. I - Derek don't go, it was an accident, I wasn't thinking -”

But Derek is already leaving the dining room, and then he's in the foyer, and then the front door is slamming closed. Stiles thinks that he left his coat there, hanging on the hook, and he'll have to bring it back to him. Scott will have to drive him back up to Derek's, or maybe...maybe he'll just go right back to his apartment.

There's silence, and then Stiles clears his throat tersely. “By the way,” he starts, lifting his hand up in the air, back of it facing the rest of the table. “Me and Derek are getting married.”

No one says anything. His father looks about ready to have an aneurism, Scott's got this look on his face like he's about to cry because he feels like it's his fault, and Melissa palms her forehead in her hand.

After another two seconds of silence, Stiles says, to himself, “congratulations.”

Scott winds up driving Stiles all the way back up to the Hale estate, and he has to buzz in to security and go through the process, give his ID card that Derek had made up for him in case of emergencies, but Scott had to stay behind. Leaving Stiles to walk up the long stretch of tarmac up to Derek's house all on his own, in the dark, shivering in the night's chill.

“I'm really sorry,” Scott had said upon dropping him off, giving him the puppy dog face. “I really didn't...if I had been thinking...”

“Believe me. It is not your fault,” Stiles said back glumly, but honestly. Stiles doesn't know whose fault it is, really. Kate's, he guesses. She's the one who did it to begin with. She's the scapegoat Stiles just might be using to get out of this entire mess.

When he gets inside the house after keying his way in, he has to wander around for a little bit to find where Derek has camped himself out. He's sprawled out on his living room couch, a piece of furniture that frankly never gets used, and he's got this tumbler of something swishing around in his hand. Stiles sighs at the sight of it – he can just tell, Derek has already had too much to drink.

It's been two hours since he stormed out of Thanksgiving, during which time Stiles was asked upwards of two dozen times by his own father if he was insane. If he's absolutely lost his mind to marry someone who is clearly not stable, who has issues, who writes about him like that, who talks to him like that, who treats him like that, and on and on and on. Through it all, Stiles just sat there, playing with his napkin, while Scott and Melissa stayed quiet on their end of the table. Truly, one of the worst Thanksgivings he has ever, ever had. If not the worst.

Padding his way across the carpeting, Stiles drops Derek's jacket onto the nearest armchair and then stands in the dim lighting of the room, awkwardly hovering. “I brought you the last of the pie,” he says in a quiet voice, holding the nearly empty tin out in a way that's meant to be enticing. “I thought you'd want it.”

For a while, Derek doesn't even look up at Stiles. He just sits there staring at his lap, lips pursed, twirling the glass around and around in his hand. Stiles really thinks that Derek is going to be mad at him, still, that he'll stay mad, that he'll yell at him and say that he doesn't really want to marry Stiles after all. He clutches the pie tin. It's his only defense, silly as it sounds.

But, Derek eventually clears his throat, and the first words out of his mouth are surprising, and also not, at the same time. “I'm sorry,” he says, barely audible, and Stiles lets out a relieved sigh. “I ruined – well. Every thing.”

Scratching at his forehead, Stiles approaches Derek warily, sitting himself down on the coffee table right in front of where Derek is leaning back looking like a big pile of misery. He puts himself right in between Derek's legs, drops the pie down next to him, and puts a hand on one of Derek's knees. In this moment, he really, really wishes that he were the type of person who used pet name – like sweetheart, or baby, or honey – just something. It would sound right, coming out of his mouth at this moment. But Stiles isn't like that. “It's not your fault. Derek, it's really not. I was the stupid one who wasn't thinking straight, I don't know how that didn't occur to me sooner. You shouldn't have – I mean. I'm sorry. Me. How awful, just – fucking terrible. On Thanksgiving. To be reminded of that. I'm so, so sorry.”

Derek stares at the liquid in his glass, fascinated by it, almost. “I already was thinking about it. You know? I always am, on holidays.”

“I know,” Stiles murmurs, squeezing Derek's knee. “I know, I know, I know. I was so stupid, how could I not – just -”

“I shouldn't have gotten mad at you,” he says resolutely, shaking his head. “I was just taking my anger out on something, someone. That should never be you.”

Stiles can't argue with that, so he just sits. Watches as Derek downs the rest of his glass, hopes that he's not planning on pouring himself another. He's got this glassy-eyed look that makes Stiles nervous, because it's not Derek. “I told them we're getting married,” he tries, but from the look Derek gives him, he's guessing that that doesn't make anything any better.

Derek drops his face down into hands and makes a noise of pure misery, shaking his head. “Oh, Christ. I'm sure that went – just – fucking fantastic.”

Pinching his lips for a moment, Stiles shrugs. “Dad says I must have fallen down and smacked my head on the pavement to even consider being around you for one more second.”

He pulls his face out from behind his hands and nods his head. “That sounds just about right, yeah.”

“I don't care,” Stiles says, leaning forward to come closer to Derek's personal space. “I really don't care what he thinks, because he doesn't know you. Anyone who has a problem with it, they don't know you either. Dad can say what he wants, but I'm...not going anywhere.”

As though he's honestly surprised by this information, Derek stares at him, half wide-eyed.

“What?” Stiles asks, tilting his head to the side. “Did you really think I'd just be like – nah, fuck you, buddy, and throw the ring in your face?”

Derek snorts. “You should.”

“Oh, blah blah, martyrdom and self-flagellation,” Stiles raises his eyes to the sky and then brings them back down on a sigh. “Save all that for the mystery book.”

Abruptly, Derek is pressing his hands over his mouth, shifting his eyes away from Stiles to stare somewhere out into the darkness of his empty house, two dozen rooms and only one person, and he breathes for a second. “Baby,” he starts, in an incredibly low, low voice. Almost like he doesn't even really want Stiles to hear it. “I've got to tell you something.”

Furrowing his brow, but trying not to look too concerned, Stiles nods. He can't imagine what it could possibly be, after this whirlwind of a night, but he has a vague memory of Derek saying something almost identical to this the night that Laura showed up and interrupted him even before he could get the words out. Shifting in his seat, rustling the pie a bit, he waits.

Derek parts his lips, and closes his eyes. “No matter what people say about this. No matter what anyone else thinks. No matter what...ideas people get. About you and I. It doesn't matter. Right?”

Stiles nods, up and down. “That's a given.”

“A given,” Derek repeats like he's convincing himself. “The books, and the money, and the business, that's just not you and I.”

“Exactly.” He trails the word off, and then takes a deep breath. “What are you talking about?”

There's a thick silence. Even from all the way down here, in a separate wing of the house, almost, Stiles can hear that old burned and half charred grandfather clock from Derek's work study, tick-tock, tick-tock, endless and on and on. The more Stiles concentrates on it, the louder it becomes, until it's almost like it's in the room with them, sitting in between them. Keeping them separated.

“What do you have to tell me?” He tries, but Derek only stares past him. After so much time has passed, and Derek still hasn't spoken, he sighs and rises into a standing position. “You've had too much to drink. Come on – it's bed time.”

Derek looks up at him, and for just a moment, he looks so horribly guilt-ridden that it almost physically pains Stiles to see that particular set to his face. Stiles holds his hand out for Derek to take, flicking his fingers and huffing out a sigh. “I'm really not mad at you,” he promises.

The words must do something to him. It's as though he's filing them away, saving them for later. Remembering the exact way that they sounded coming out of Stiles' mouth in Stiles' voice, so he can use them when he needs them again.

****

 _Honestly, I look at him sometimes and I don't know what I see. What is it that I ever thought I saw in him to begin with? Oh, but, fuck, of course I know what I thought I saw in him, I was fucking stupid and thought I literally saw the rest of my life right there in front of me every time he opened his eyes up into mine. I wanted that so much. I searched for that so much. Now that I have it, I don't even know why I wanted it. (Spark [unpublished manuscript], Derek Hale pg. 133)_  
****

Stiles tries to talk his dad down from hating Derek so much, but he doesn't think that he's ever going to have very much progress with that, if any at all. As far as he's concerned, the man is emotionally abusive and manipulative, uses money and nice things to keep Stiles in a relationship with him. Stiles feels insulted by the insinuation that he would ever choose to stay with a person like that, not to mention the insinuation that Derek could ever possibly be like that.  
He knows Derek. He might not always understand Derek, but he knows him. And he knows that Derek isn't like that in any way, shape, or form. His dad might never get that. But he better get used to Derek either way, because Stiles isn't going anywhere. He's got a ring on his finger, and even though Lydia and Derek have both told Stiles up and down that no one, no one, outside of immediate family and closest friends is meant to know about it, it doesn't matter. Like Stiles gives a fuck if the magazines catch up to it before the day they're actually married. Like he gives a fuck if anyone knows until years off in the future.

It's like what Derek and he talked about – no one else needs to know anything. Whatever people think, whatever people think they glean out of Beacons, that's on them. Stiles and Derek aren't responsible for any of it, and they don't have to answer to anyone. Not about what they do when they're alone.

Stiles loves Derek. Derek loves Stiles. This is uncomplicated. Every thing else, everyone else, that's where the fucking complications come in.

On a chilly day in early December, Stiles is alone in the Hale mansion. Typically, he spends his time doing things that Derek only barely tolerates when he is around – like sliding across the long hardwood hallway in nothing but tube socks, or jumping on one of the guest beds until the frame nearly breaks, or sprawling out on the floor with his laptop and phone and going on Netflix benders while live tweeting whatever it is he's watching.

Today, he feels like lying in bed and waiting for Derek to get back from a meeting with Lydia (which he's not invited to or allowed to tag along on, go fucking figure), and not doing much else. He's got the day off, he and his dad are barely on speaking terms, and Scott is busy with Allison. So, what else? It feels like a perfect day to do nothing except laze.

Problem is, an essential part of being a lazy piece of shit is having his phone charged up all the way, and he seems to have misplaced the charger he keeps in the Stiles Drawer. All that's in there right now is piles of clothes and some DVD's. Annoyed, he paws around in Derek's bedroom for a few minutes, but the place is a wreck, right now. Stiles' clothes are strewn about the floor, Derek's books are in piles here and there, and there are still a couple of pizza boxes piled up in the corner from a couple of nights ago that neither of them have gotten around to cleaning up. Typical them, but every time each of them sees it, they think gotta get rid of that, and then neither of them ever do. Stiles' room in his apartment is pretty much exactly the same. The Derek Drawer over there is sparse aside from spare white t-shirts and a second laptop.

Remembering that Derek most likely has one in his study, in spite of the fact that that room is still a Stiles free zone, he hobbles down the hallway and creaks the door open. It's only a Stiles free zone when Derek is working, after all – since there's no Derek, and thus no work being done and no one to distract and nothing to distract from, he doesn't see the big deal.

He walks across the rug on bare feet, and finds the same scene he always sees. Post-its, his laptop closed and asleep, some empty coffee mugs and cups from various establishments (including the McCafe? Literally, Derek, what the fuck), and book piles. His chair is spun out facing the door like he only left here seconds ago and will be back any second to get back to work, and Stiles sort of smiles at that.

He sifts through the post-its, leans over the back of the desk to see if there's a charger plugged in somewhere back there, and then kneels on the ground to peer in at the power strip to see if it's hooked up there. Finding nothing, he purses his lips and starts accepting a fate of a phone-less afternoon until Derek gets back, and pulls himself upright on his knees.

He's just about to use the desk as leverage to pull himself back up to a standing position and walk out of the library, when he spots it. Not the phone charger, unfortunately or fortunately depending on how one wants to look at it, but instead something perhaps more interesting.

There, sitting in nearly plain sight, is a bound manuscript. He stares at it for a second, perplexed, cocking his head to the side. Reaching forwards, he clears some of the papers covering it up, and finally stands up all the way to get a better look at it. What he finds nearly doesn't make any sense, but he's not an idiot, so he puts two and two together.

In Derek's writing, scribbled almost like his signature would be as though he had done it in a rush, it reads Spark pgs 400. The word Spark is underlined, capitalized, and Stiles squints at it, taking it fully in his hands.

It has to be Mystery #5, Stiles thinks, because it looks exactly like any other manuscript he's ever seen – though, last time he checked, Derek didn't fucking have a book called Spark. Untitled my ass, Stiles thinks with a smirk, tapping the thick cover with a finger and rolling his eyes. What, was he just embarrassed? Bashful? That seems unlikely for Derek, but there's no other explanation for why he's been lying and saying there's still no title, when here it is in front of his face. Printed and bound, no less.

There's a very strong possibility that he should not open it up and read it. He knows this. It would be a violation of Derek's privacy, because he has not opted to share its contents with Stiles on his own time, as of yet. Matter of fact, Derek hasn't even done the bare minimum of telling Stiles what the fucking theme for this thing is, and the title is doing nothing to give him even a hint. All signs point in flashing neon to DO NOT OPEN DO NOT READ DO NOT SNOOP. It almost feels like he's holding Derek's private journal or diary in his hands, and to read it would just be – it wouldn't be fair. Or right.

He puts it back down on the desk. But then he glances at the door creaked open. Derek isn't even here. He could just take a little peak inside, just the teeniest of glances, and Derek would never have to know. In a way, it's almost half Derek's fault for refusing to tell Stiles even anything about it. Stiles might not even be half as curious as he is if Derek would've just told him something.

It really isn't Derek's fault, at all, though. He can share or not share what he wants.

All the same, Stiles glances over his shoulder one last time, listening intently for footsteps or a door opening. When he hears nothing, he settles down into Derek's desk chair, wheels himself forward, and opens up the front cover.

The title and Derek's name printed in block, and then Stiles flips it, flips, flips, until he gets to a page with chapter one typed out. Bending his neck over the desk and resting his cheek in his palm, he starts reading.

Once upon a time, I wanted a fairytale. It sounds odd, coming from me, doesn't it? I feel as though I've come across sometimes as a bit pessimistic, or callous, or just altogether disenchanted with most things and most stories that don't even in tragedy. All my books end that way.

Well, Beacons didn't. The twist about Beacons, though, is that I didn't realize that that story wasn't finished yet. I didn't realize I had another five hundred, six hundred, a thousand pages to write. I should have held out. I should have waited. If I were smart, and I had ever been thinking clearly, then I would have waited. In my opinion, and based on my personal experiences, that's when fairytales happen.

When you don't finish. Happy endings are mid-points, slamming a book closed when you're only just at the calm before the storm, walking out of a movie at the first kiss and pretending like every thing is going to stay that way forever. What kind of life do they live together, and what troubles do they have, and what future is waiting for them? You imagine it. I imagined it.

Beacons kept going, and going, and going, and he kept existing, existing, and existing, and like all flames just die out until there's nothing but embers left, I felt that he started to fade.

The introduction to this book is simple – I loved him. I thought he was going to save my life.

I was wrong.

Stiles pulls his neck up, and reads the words on the first page, again, and again, and again. He tries to retain them, but every time he thinks he's started making sense out of them, they slip through his grasp and he has to start all over again. He cocks his head to the side, briefly wonders if he's really reading this shit, if this is fucking happening, and then parts his lips.

His heart sinks, deep, deep into his chest, and just like waking up in the morning after the most amazing dream and realizing that it was all just a dream, he understands now why Derek didn't want him to read this. He gets why he never said what it was about.

Masochistically, either because he just doesn't believe it or because he hates himself and wants to suffer just a little bit more, he flips through the pages and lands on a random one.

I thought he was this shining light in the dead of the ocean, and it turns out he might've actually just been the lantern on a ship, passing through, passing right past my own, drifting out into the ocean, and -

More or less, I just started to believe that the mates thing was all bullshit, anyway. It's funny how I've spent so much of my time trying to advocate for more awareness of what it's like, of how humans don't understand, couldn't ever understand. When all along, I was the one who just didn't fucking get it, not yet. How I really and truly believed that there was such a thing as for life. With a human, no fucking less -

\- just the thing about humans, is they're so fickle, and they can't make up their minds, and from the way he hems and haws over -

\- my sun, my moon, my stars. I could almost fucking laugh at how ludicrous it is to me, now -

I thought I could write a book on the way his skin feels underneath my hands, or how his eyes look in sunlight, or the way he laughs – in a way, I sort of am, now. Just about how fucking sick of all of it I got, and how sick everyone gets of everything that they once loved, eventually.

Stiles is just about to come up to a paragraph that looks pretty fucking interesting – he skims the words I thought I knew what torment was and can't do much except for swallow the bile rising in his throat – when the door creaks.

“Stiles?” Derek's voice. It sounds echoed, or far away, like he's calling to him from another part of the house, or from outside of it, or from underwater. It's like he can barely think with the blood rushing in his ears. “What are you...”

The half-question hangs there in between them, and for a moment, Stiles just sits there. He doesn't look up, but he sees Derek frozen solid in his place in the doorway, not a single inch of him moving in even the slightest twitch. Stiles curls and uncurls his fingers around the edges of the pages, and his vision starts blurring. Tears, or a blackout from shock, or a panic attack. He doesn't know. All he knows is that Derek is standing there, and that the two of them are finally on the same fucking page.

Derek knows that Stiles knows, for the first time in months. Funny how Stiles didn't even fucking know that there was something he was missing. Funny how he has a fucking ring on his finger, and funny how he has the key to Derek's house along with the rest, and funny how he brought Derek home for Thanksgiving, and funny how Derek has told Stiles over and over again how much he loves him, and funny, hilarious, really – the joke is on him. It has been this entire time. He didn't even hear the laugh track playing over his head.

Just the tick, tock, of that half-burned clock sitting in the corner. Time in between them. Space distancing them.

This could be a fight. It could be the biggest fight they'd ever have, it could be the last fight they ever have. But Stiles...oh, he doesn't have anything to say. There's not a single word he can think to say. Not to Derek, and not to himself. He can hardly hear himself think over the sound of ringing in his ears.

Stiles stands up from the chair, the same one that Derek has written all five of his books in, the first four Stiles thought were unmitigated works of fucking genius, and throws the manuscript as hard as physically possibly in Derek's general direction. Derek catches it, wolf reflexes after all, and when Stiles chances just the barest of glances at his face, he finds it in rare sorts.

Eyes huge in their sockets, face ashen pale, brows drawn down in...something. Not anger, and not annoyance. Devastation, maybe. Carnage.

It doesn't matter, it really doesn't, it doesn't. Stiles walks past him, shoves the door all the way open until it bangs against the opposite wall, and he keeps on walking down the hall, towards the bedroom. His shoulders stay tight, and it's almost like he's walking through a fun house, the way the edges of every thing are just blurred, and he can only barely make out the double doors of the master bedroom a mere twenty feet away from him.

“No.” Derek's footsteps come up quickly behind him, much quickly than Stiles is walking, and Derek's voice is suddenly close in his ear. “No, hang on a second, it's not what you think, it's not what it – I know it looks bad, it looks really bad, but I can explain this, I can...”

Stiles swipes his arm lengthwise across his face, because apparently he's crying, and bends down on Derek's floor to rip his backpack up off the ground. His laptop is blinking, blinking, and he shoves it inside unceremoniously with the charger, wiping his eyes again.

“They told me to do it, they said it wouldn't be interesting if I wrote a whole second book about how much I fucking love you, they told me to do it.”

Clothes picked up in between Stiles' fingers, pushed in bunches into his bag.

“I've been trying to find a way to tell you, but I – I couldn't – Stiles, please -”

He rips the Stiles Drawer nearly off of its hinges and dumps it out onto the ground, before kneeling down and picking up each individual thing and trying to stuff them in with the rest – he's running out of space. He'll have to come back a second time for another load. Or just leave it all here for Derek to do whatever the fuck he wants with it all.

“They made me do it. It's fictional, it's not real, I don't think any of that,” Derek follows behind Stiles as he plucks his shoes out from under the bed and presses his feet in haphazardly, untied, laces flying. “I was going to tell you, please, it was going to be like a game we were in on, it was just – Stiles, stop. Stop.”

Stiles tries to surge forwards, but Derek has his hands held out in front of him – half in surrender, and half like he might use them to grab Stiles, hold him back, keep him from leaving – and he's not moving out of Stiles' way.

“Stop it,” he says again, using a voice one might use to speak to an injured animal that's prone to lash out if one were to make any sudden movements. “I can explain this.”

Without bothering to clear his throat, so the words come out like chipped glass, Stiles says, “get out of my way.”

“You need to understand this. I need you to understand this. I'm under contract, and if I don't write what they want to print, then...please. It's not. True.”

At the moment, Stiles doesn't want to hear a single word that Derek has to say. He can't hardly stand to even look at him, to even be in this room, in this house, in this town, near him within a hundred mile radius. He feels like vomiting. “Move.”

“No, no, baby, you're not listening to me, you're not hearing what I'm saying,” Stiles tries to walk past him again, but Derek moves right along with him, nearly using his hand to push Stiles back where he wants him. Stiles recoils as if Derek's hand is a blow torch, ripping his arm out of Derek's reach and closer to himself protectively. “I have to do these things, I had to write that. I – they didn't give me a choice. Please. Please, I was going to tell you, I swear, I -”

Derek has said things like you're all mine and I'm all yours it's all about us, you and me, and on and on and on, this constant litany of it, and Stiles believed that. But he realizes now, in this moment, as Derek weaves out these fucking excuses about these people and everyone else that he realizes that none of it, not a second of it, is true. It's not fucking true. It just isn't.

“Yours first,” Stiles sneers in a mocking tone, shaking his head. “Fucking Lydia's first. The publisher's first. Your editor's first. Your fucking fans' first.”

Derek shakes his head, like it's all he can do, like he's trying to argue it but he can't find the words anymore. He can never find the fucking words when Stiles is looking him right in his eyes – and Stiles never realized how much of a tell that might have been.

“You are a coward,” he accuses, stepping closer so he's almost right in Derek's face. “You are a liar, and a coward, and you made me up. You fucking created me for your books and for your sales, and you used me -”

“No, I didn't, it wasn't supposed to be like this!” He reaches forwards to touch Stiles, again, and this time, Stiles very nearly slaps him clean across his fucking face. But he stops himself at the last second, clenching his fists down at his side and breathing in and out, evenly.

Like Stiles has said – he's always been entirely Derek's. But the twist with all of this is that Derek...he can't ever be entirely Stiles'. No. There's too many other people waiting on him, and expecting things from him, for Derek to ever truly belong to anyone. Let alone Stiles. Stiles wasted so much time genuinely thinking that he was going to wind up being the one to ruin everything, just because he didn't have the same instincts as wolves. Funny how things turn out.

“Spark. What the fuck does that mean? Huh?”

“It's bullshit -”

“That I'm a spark? That I'm going to burn your fucking life down?” When he doesn't get any response except for Derek's mouth working open and closed around words he still can't find, Stiles closes his eyes. “I love you. What am I to you?”

Derek swallows. “Every thing,” he says. It sounds real, the way he says it, now – so honest, and true, and open, eyes wide and vulnerable.

But Stiles would be stupid. He would be an idiot to believe that, now. Stiles holds his hand up in the air and rips the engagement ring clean off his finger, dropping it down onto the carpet without a sound while Derek says please don't fucking leave me, Stiles, I know I fucked up but if you listen to me, please let me talk, I can fix all of this, I can explain it to you, I can explain it, please, please, please, but Stiles brushes past him.

He's going down the stairs, and Derek isn't even following him. He must be able to sense that Stiles isn't going to stick around, no matter what he says, how much he begs, and he must be able to tell that it's done. Done. It should've been done the first time around. He should've known better, the entire time, and he should have listened to Laura when she told him that Derek destroys, and it's just what he fucking does. And he uses his god damn books to do it.

Who wouldn't want Derek Hale to write about them, Stiles parrots his own words from months earlier in his own head. Who would be so insane as to not want that?

****

“I'm so sorry, Stiles,” Scott runs his hand up and down his best friend's back, pressing himself as close to Stiles as he can physically get. “Shit, that's...terrible. I am so sorry.”  
“I always knew he was bad news,” Erica adds on from her place sitting criss cross on the carpeting in front of them. “Creative types are always fucking like that – like, you're not even really a person, you're just a metaphor for something shitty that happened in their childhood, or some shit. Whatever.” She pulls her hair into a ponytail and rips into a twizzler with her teeth. “Should've stolen his credit cards on your way out.”

Scott heaves a big sigh, the rubbing turning into firm pats on the back. “I'm sorry,” he says again.

The thing is, Stiles honestly doesn't know what he believes to be the truth.

He has two options, he guesses. He can choose to believe that the entire mates thing was bullshit from the start. That Derek went out and found some gullible, poor, stupid human kid to jerk around, just so that he could be seen in pictures with a human – which, of course, would have made front page news, and Derek knew that all along. The final intent was to use said human for interviews, in his books, to sell, to make money, for sex, and that last thought alone has Stiles' blood going cold every time it crosses his mind. But that's just option number one.

Option number two is that Derek is as much a victim in all this as maybe Stiles is. Well...okay. That's being generous. Reworded – option number two is that Derek was pressured into writing what he wrote just for the sake of sales and just to keep people talking. It's possible that, if this is really the truth, it makes sense from a business standpoint. Stiles honestly can't imagine that anyone would want to read another book that's all about how awesome and great Stiles is, and how great Derek's life is now, because that's not Derek Hale. You don't do a one eighty on your customer base, like that. Beacons was a success because it was half misery, still, and half not. A perfect mixture of both.

Stiles knows that one option is at least marginally better than the other. Maybe it's because he's naive, still, or he's got on those rose colored glasses, or because he can't stop thinking about Derek as a person he loves, but he always leans more toward the second. He can't imagine Derek being so cruel, so fucking heartless, and he just can't accept the fact that every thing that Derek said about him and to him when they were alone was just bullshit.

Stiles likes to believe what Derek said the last time he saw him, that they were both meant to be in on a game together. It's easier. While at the same time, sometimes harder.

Derek doesn't call. He doesn't text, he doesn't show up at his apartment or at the diner, or Scott's place or his dad's, either. It's more or less like he drops off of Stiles' radar altogether so he can do God knows what with himself. Sometimes on his way in to work, Stiles catches sight of the hill behind the gas station, where just on the other side lie the woods where Derek's mansion sits all alone and secluded by the trees. He's right there, close enough that all it would take for Stiles to get there is a turn in the opposite direction.

Stiles stares at it, and he doesn't know if he's worried that Derek might one day just decide to materialize in the diner, or if he's waiting for it. It might be a little bit of both.

****

“Fired? No, no, that's impossible,” the television personality shakes her head with a smile on her face, eyeballing her co-host with a level of frustrated amusement. “You're messing with me.”  
“I'm serious,” he says back to her, shrugging in his carefully tailored suit. “Derek Hale fired Lydia Martin.”

“No!”

“You can choose not to believe,” hands held out in the air in a placating gesture, “I know, I know it's a tough pill to swallow...”

“The names are synonymous. Derek Hale, Lydia Martin, one mind, one body. I swear -”

“Apparently, that's over, now.” The camera zooms in on his face, and the commentary section is ending, going straight into the actual story of it all – if you can even call it that. “According to several sources, including Claw Mark publishers themselves, Derek Hale has dropped Lydia Martin as his publicist, and as nearly everyone else agrees, the decision was abrupt. No word yet on what could have possibly brought on the fracturing of Hollywolf's most successful duo, but seeing as how Lydia Martin has actually left her house without lipstick two times in a row already, we'd say it was something of an ugly break up.”

“That said, nobody has caught sight of Hale paramour Stiles Stilinski in about two weeks – let alone both Derek and Stiles together. Speculation has it that Derek and Stiles are on the outs, because of something that Lydia Martin had done to -”

Things have always sort of just wound up blamed on Lydia. It might be part of the job description, to take the heat for things, to go in front of the public and shoulder all the responsibility of handling a scandal when Derek's gone too far – and that translates into Lydia being the bad guy, always, and Derek being the victim, always. It's not fair, Stiles has always thought. He really thought this when Lydia and Derek were just idol figures, posters in his bedroom or clippings from magazines. Of course, when he met Lydia...he sort of understood the tendency for people to turn her into a villain.

All the same, it is no surprise to him whatsoever that Derek finally snapped. There are a million rumors, that she walked out on him, that he fired her, that he was having an affair with her and had to let her go to keep up his image, blah blah blah – but Stiles knows, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he finally up and fucking did it. In spite of the nearly two dozen times Derek made it crystal clear what a bad idea it would be, he's gone and done it. In his head, he imagines the offices of his publishers blowing up into a frenzy, papers flying in the air, phones ringing off the hook, some woman in a serious looking pantsuit standing at a floor to ceiling window overlooking Hollywood and puffing on a cigarette with narrowed eyes.

What is a surprise is when he opens up his apartment door after unchaining it to find Lydia Martin standing there. She looks bizarre out there, in the grimy hallway, draped in a fine scarf with her silky hair pulled back into a ponytail. Stiles blinks at her several times, looks down either end of the hall to make sure she doesn't have some dudes waiting in the wings to whack him when he's not paying attention, and then looks back to meet her eyes.

“If you're here to beg for your job back,” he starts without breaking her eye contact, “I hate to tell you, but I don't have very much pull with Derek, these days.”

Lydia purses her lips at him, raises her chin in the air – it's funny to see her looking this much shorter than him, and it's not just because she's in flats – and asks, “can I come inside?”

Stiles quickly wonders if he has something embarrassing sitting out in the open in his apartment that he doesn't want Lydia to see. And then he remembers that Lydia has walked in on much worse things than dirty dishes and empty takeout food containers, so he just swings the door wider and steps aside to let her in.

Once they're both standing in his living room, she clutches onto her bag tightly with both hands and just stands there. Normally, when Lydia's in his presence, she's either barking out orders at him or making some snide comment about something on his person or his attitude or – or just something. This time, though, she's dead quiet, staring at him like she expects him to speak first. Stiles doesn't know if she's expecting him to offer condolences for the loss of her job (and, consequently, half her life), but he does know that there's no way in hell that that's going to happen.

So, seeing no other option, he says, “er – I've got a pot of coffee, pretty fresh. Do you want -”

“That would be nice, thank you.”

Scratching at his cheek, he leads her a few feet over to his tiny little kitchen and gestures for her to take a seat at the table. It's almost funny to watch her sinking into the chair he bought for fifty cents at a yard sale, the padding on the seat puffing out air as she goes. She makes no comment about the state of the place, the rust, the dishes in the sink, doesn't even make a face. She just puts her purse down beside the leg of her chair, and watches Stiles as he pulls down two mugs from his cupboard.

He picks the pikachu mug for her, and asks, “cream or sugar?”

“Both.” Pause. “Extra sugar.”

“How much extra?”

“How much do you put in yours?”

“Spoon and a half.”

“Three spoons.”

Stiles lifts his eyes away from his sugar jar and raises his eyebrows, but she just shrugs. Who would've thought, Stiles thinks to himself while he does as directed, that all those times Lydia came sweeping into a room with a large coffee cup in her hands, she probably had asked for eight pumps of vanilla instead of the standard five.

Once he's seated across from her in his own chair, drinking his coffee and tapping a finger on the table, she meets his eyes. She sips once, daintily, and says, “you make good coffee.”

“Dunkin Donuts brand.” Then, he laughs to himself. “Have you ever even been to a Dunkin Donuts?”

She doesn't purse her lips or roll her eyes or flick her hair over her shoulder – she just answers, coolly. “You're not the only person who at some point lived a normal life, Stiles. Yes I've been to a Dunkin Donuts.”

He never thought about that. In his mind, Lydia has always been running that night club, and doing press for Derek, and walking around in six inch heels all perfect and put together. He never once thought that she might have at one point been a freckle faced ginger-headed kid who had a favorite donut flavor.

“I didn't come here to talk about that,” she says, putting her mug down and then leaning over the table.

“You say that like I'm supposed to know what you did come here for,” he raises his arms, shakes his head. “But I've got nothin'.” No fucking idea, literally.

She stays quiet, just for a moment, and then she stares downwards into her half-finished coffee, watching as the light bounces off the top. “Derek and I were best friends.”

Stiles nods his head.

“I think I forgot about that in the face of so much else.”

“I forgot about that,” he tells her honestly, and it's true. He hasn't thought about her and Derek as anything but business partners in so long, nothing more than boss and employee. They haven't acted like anything else.

“It used to be that he relied on me for every thing, and wanted my advice on every thing, and always listened to me and gave my opinions some actual thought.” She sips. “When you came into the picture, that stopped. He didn't want to listen to me anymore.”

Is he supposed to apologize? He doesn't feel like apologizing to her about much of anything. Plus, it's not exactly his fault that Derek got sick and tired of her telling him what to do, when it came to Stiles.

“I don't really resent you for that – anymore,” she quickly tacks on, a wry smile making its way onto her face, “but fuck, I really did for a minute. I really, really did. It was just my way of blaming the fall out of me and Derek's friendship of something and someone concrete, instead of seeing it for what it really was. I'm sorry about that.”

He would've expected Lydia to be the type of person who couldn't physically make herself be humble and apologize about much of anything, not without gritting her teeth and averting her eyes. But she stares him directly in the eyes and says it so earnestly, it's all he can do to swallow and accept it.

“Ah, well,” he shrugs. “I'm easy to hate, as you might have noticed.”

She puts her mug down again and sighs out a long breath, shaking her head. “Derek and I drifted because I became obsessed with the money, and the sales, and every thing that came along with that, and he...he cared about other things, much more.”

“You keep talking about him like he's dead, or something.”

“As far as the people in this room are concerned,” she mutters, “he may as well be.”

Stiles takes a deep breath, looks upward at the ceiling, and asks the question they both know he was eventually going to have to fucking ask. “How much did you know about -” he stops, closing his mouth with grit teeth, and then opens up again. “...Spark? The manuscript. Did you know about – what he was writing, and did you -”

“I knew.” She admits, having the decency to look somewhat cowed by the truth. “It wasn't my idea, that was all his other people. Frankly, I didn't like it, but it wasn't my call, in the end.”

“You didn't like it,” he repeats tonelessly, narrowing his eyes.

“We got into this because we both felt like certain stories needed to be told. We didn't get into it to tell lies just to keep the people entertained.” She says this as if she's screamed it into Derek's face enough times that all she can be when she says it now is tired. “He isn't a television show. But maybe he started to feel like he was.”

Who wouldn't? With the cameras, and the magazines, and the way people talk about him. Who wouldn't?

“So it was...really a lie, then.”

“Oh, Stiles,” she shakes her head and a touch of her old self comes into play, rolling her eyes and giving him a don't be a fucking idiot look. “The fact that you even have to ask me that...”

“Have you read it?” He asks her, cutting her off. “Because let me tell you – if those are lies, then he must be one hell of a storyteller.”

“Of course I've read it. Not a word of it was true,” she assures him. “He's just very, very good at what he does. You know. He's the best.”

Stiles has heard that same thing over and over again, from reviews to fansites to Derek's own sister, and he really and honestly believed the same thing. He might still believe the same thing, even in this situation. God, he loved Derek's books so much when he was a teenager, in college, when he was all alone and feeling like a failure after all of it – he thought that the fucking wisdom of the universe was in those ridiculous books, and...he still thinks that.

“I wasn't fired because I was the one who made the final call on all that, and he just felt like getting back at me,” she finishes the last of her coffee and peers behind her to see if there's any left in the pot – there is. She stands and makes herself right at home in his rinkydink kitchen, pouring herself some more, reaching into the fridge for the half and half, taking a spoon out from the drying rack. “I was fired because he wanted someone to blame every thing on. God fucking knows, if for one second Derek tried to take responsibility for his own actions entirely on himself, he'd probably wind up as a certifiable basket case.” She taps her spoon on the edge of the mug when she's done stirring. “That's what the books are for.”

Stiles runs his hands down his face – and he doesn't know what to think. Of all the people he thought would be coming to him to try and tell him the actual truth, Lydia didn't even fucking rank on the list.

“Unfortunately, he's gone and gotten himself into a pickle. In two months he has to hand over a finished copy of a book that's a certifiable fabrication, and then it'll get published because lies or not it's good, and then – well.”

And then, well. Stiles doesn't know what would happen then. “If he puts that fucking book out, I'll never forgive him as long as I live,” he hisses, mostly just to himself. Just to get the truth out there, so there's someone who heard it, who can keep him to his word, so he won't go crawling back.

She actually laughs. “I wouldn't either. He should have been honest with you from the start.”

“Right?” He agrees, perking up at having someone on his fucking side – even if the specific person is a little surprising. “I wouldn't have even been nearly as mad if he had come home from that first meeting and told me the truth.”

“You would've let him write it?”

“I mean...maybe?” He honestly can't say for sure. It's hard to imagine that scenario now that they're all living in the worst case one, instead. If Derek had sat him down and looked him in the eyes and said they want me to write this heap of trash, Stiles really doesn't know what his reaction would have been. “I think in that alternate universe, the fact that it was all about me wouldn't have bothered me, but the part where he's essentially writing bullshit and sticking a non-fiction sticker on the side would have.”

For maybe the first time since they met, Lydia gives him an approving look. All important nod, and smiling, and an impressed glint in her eyes. “It's just not him.”

“It really isn't,” Stiles agrees solemnly, and he wonders how Derek even got to this point. If Lydia was the one who was obsessed with money and numbers, then why was she the one trying to tell him not to fucking do it?

Answering that question for him, Lydia speaks. “I think he was afraid of losing success on his fifth one,” she drops her used mug down into the sink alongside a plate that once held spaghetti, walks over to the table and collects her purse from the ground. “And, specifically, he was afraid that if he didn't do so well that you wouldn't be so impressed anymore.”

Stiles blinks, watches her fit her purse onto her shoulder. “That's – insane.” A lot of words go through his head upon hearing that sentence, but that's the one he settles on to describe it. In-fuckin-sane. When has Stiles ever once said he even cared? Or even acted like it?

“To you and I, it is. But in Derek's mind, it makes perfect fucking sense. Trust me. He has an ego issue a mile wide.” Before she walks out the door into the hallway, she pauses in the frame, giving him a small smile and shaking her head. “And you've always had pull, with him, Stiles.”

****

“Holy shit. Did you hear?”

  
Erica has her phone held out to Stiles from behind the counter. She's leaning over it, body stretching out, and she keeps waving her phone again and again so the glitter case she has catches the light and makes Stiles squint.

“I probably didn't,” he says frankly. He's been avoiding social media like he's going to catch something if he even so much as refreshes his twitter feed. When the moment comes that everyone finds out Derek and Stiles are finito, he really doesn't want to know what people will say. When he and Derek were together, it's because he never wanted to know what kind of things people were going to say about him, what mean, nasty things they could come up with, or inappropriate, or overarching, or any of it.

This time, he's scared that all he's going to see are people having fucking parties and celebrating because he's fucking miserable. That would just make things worse. He doesn't know if people know. He doesn't want to.

She keeps shaking the phone. “Look.”

“I really, really don't need to know -”

“You really, really do,” she thrusts it at him, and Stiles glares at her without even glancing at it. It's de ja vu to that day at McDonald's when Erica cackled in his face about him being called a twink, and she referred to Stiles and Derek as beauty and the beast. Shit was still vaguely amusing, back then. Not so much anymore. “Fine,” she retracts her phone, and inexplicably smacks the strap of her bra against her skin like she's relieving tension, or something. “I'll tell you then. Alpha werewolf author Derek Hale -”

“Seriously...” he moans, covering his face with his hands. “Erica, I will kick you the fuck out -”

“...is being sued for breach of contract by his own publishing company, Claw Mark.”

Stiles uncovers his face, and gapes. Erica looks a bit self-satisfied, but drops her phone down into her pocket – well, tries to. Stiles claws it out of her hand immediately and stares at the article, mouth working around words that won't come out. Sued? Fucking sued?

“It's fucking insane – you know, he started that!”

“I know that,” Stiles says back in a monotone, remembering the exact day he turned it over to someone else whose name escapes him, at the moment. It's quite possibly the biggest career mistake he ever made. Like – starting up your own fucking publishing company and then just handing it all over to someone you barely know? 2011 Derek must have been on shit.

“They've got some nerve...” her voice trills off in the background, but he's enraptured in just staring, and staring, and staring at the picture that tops the article off, of Derek and whoever the hell, signing the contract with thin smiles on their faces. Oh, Christ. “...even have the grounds to do that.”

Stiles swallows, finally putting the phone back down on the counter and sliding it over to Erica. “If he's not doing what he said he would in a written and signed statement,” he says slowly, “they can do whatever they want to him.”

And the only way that Derek could ever breach that contract is if he flat out refused to write that book they've been begging him for. Either that, or he's trying to get out of it altogether – the contract, that is. Or just away from the publishers and the editors that he turned his own business over to.

Most likely, he's not going to finish Spark. Which, of course, Stiles is incredibly relieved about because he doesn't think he'd survive having to live through its release and promotion. But also, at the same time...is it even god damn worth it, at this point? He was almost done with it. And he doesn't owe anything to Stiles, not anymore, so he can do whatever the fuck he wants with his time and money and energy.

After all the time he's spent convincing Stiles that pissing off the publishers and the editors and Lydia would be a bad fucking idea and that just going along with what they say is always the better option, why now? With his career at its literal peak, why the fuck now?

Stiles has half a mind to march back to the mansion and tell him to stop being such a fucking idiot, send them the manuscript, Stiles is over it, really, and Christmas is coming, and who wants to be sued at Christmas?

But he doesn't do that. He tries to forget about it, because what Derek does or does not do is none of his business. If the man wants to be sued just to prove some kind of point, then fine. Let him be that way. Let him fuck up like that. Stiles does not care.

He doesn't.

Stiles stares up at the Hale Mansion with squinted eyes and a frown on his face. It's strange, that it's only been a couple of weeks that he and Derek haven't spoken to or seen one another, but it somehow feels like it's been years. That the mansion should have vines crawling up the sides of it, and the grass should be all overgrown and untended to, a window or two smashed in. But the place looks exactly the same, and just as immaculate and clean as it did the very first time Stiles laid eye on it.

Thinking about that time, now, Stiles gets a lump in his throat. It's funny how, when they were still together, he used to think about that night, the first night he spent here, and get all warm and fuzzy on the inside. It was honestly one of his favorite memories of the two of them, and now all he feels when thinking about is just...sad.

Because he's a disgusting masochist, he remembers one of his favorite lines from any of Derek's books - the shittiest part about memories, is that no matter if the time was good, or if it was one of the worst times of your life, the memories always sting. Lost or taken away, hidden or found, it doesn't really matter. Time does that.

Derek and Stiles have had a lot of time between them, now, and Stiles doesn't know how much of their good memories have been stolen because of it.

In spite of the fact that Derek without a doubt heard the sound of what could only ever be his shitty Jeep bumbling up the drive way from the very first turn off of the dirt road in the preserve, he's not just standing there waiting at the front door when he uses the key to let himself in. Honestly, he's half surprised that Derek hasn't already got the locks changed.

And, then again, he's not fucking surprised at all.

Previous history tells him that Derek is either in his bedroom or in his study (or not here at all – though the security guards were all outside and milling about like they only ever are when he's there), so Stiles climbs up the winding staircase up to the second floor. When he sees the light in Derek's bedroom gleaming out into the hallway, the only light on for the entire empty, dark, windowless floor, he sighs. Thinks about crying, for just a second, and then decides against it.

He walks the rest of the way and Derek is listening. He should plan what to say, he thinks, he should've been planning it on the way over, he should've been thinking about it every single day – but all he can think of as he walks is that either they're going to work it out, or they're not. It's not clear what Stiles wants to happen, or even what he should want to happen.

Sticking his head in, he finds Derek standing there wringing his hands together. He looks nervous. Which Stiles thinks is funny, in a way, because the worst part is over. The truth is out there and said and realized, and now all he has to do is accept responsibility for it. Maybe it's the fact that he has to do it face to face, instead of just hiding behind words in a book. Stiles wonders how many times Derek has used those fucking books as a way to absolve himself of all blame, the ultimate self-flagellation.

They stare. Derek twists his fingers. Stiles feels sad.

“Why would you do that?” Stiles asks, voice quiet. It's the only natural start to this conversation, and it's the polar opposite of the last time they saw each other – Derek isn't yelling and Stiles isn't crying. They're both just standing there, looking at one another. “Why would you ever, ever do that? How could you write that?”

He expects some excuse. He expects I had to they made me or I was just doing my job or this is how I make my money, Stiles, like it or not God give it a rest already, or, I don't want to argue with you, it was a mistake. Instead, Derk ducks his head in shame, and he doesn't meet Stiles' eyes. Like he thinks he doesn't deserve to. “I'm not a very good person,” is what he comes up with, and Stiles releases a puff of air out from between his teeth, because he knows.

It's the same thing Derek said to Stiles after their first massive breakup. And Stiles knows that in this moment, Derek means I warned you, didn't I? He did. Laura did. Everyone did. All the words he's written, all the pages in the world, and that's all he can think to say. Perhaps it's really all there is to say.

“It wasn't meant to be like that,” Derek goes on. “It just – it just got so easy. Making you up like that, it just got easy.”

“The real me was so hard, then?”

Derek gets this fucking abysmal expression on his face. It's the kind of expression reserved for people who are literally watching their entire life go up into flames right before their eyes. “I'm not a very great writer, either. Look, I – I was going to to tell you about it, I swear that I was. I was never going to just blindside you with that shit, I was going to tell you – ask you – but I -”

“You got halfway done with it.”

He scrapes his hand across his forehead. “I just couldn't tell you. It was too humiliating.”

“Humiliating for you?” Stiles lets out half a laugh, a bitter sounding thing. “What a fucking twist.”

“I couldn't write anything that wasn't bullshit,” he explains evenly. “I couldn't fucking write about you anymore without it all coming out like meaningless bullshit. I had to make something up, completely fabricate every thing to -” he cuts off and clenches his jaw like he can't even speak it out loud, it's too fucking mortifying, for him. “The way you think about me. The way you look at me. Like you fucking think the stars are in the sky because I wrote them into existence, or something.”

He thought – and in spite of everything still to this day thinks, might always think, no matter what happens – that Derek is a standalone fucking prodigy. Stiles envies him. How he turns everything that he doesn't say into art, and all Stiles can make out of his silence is just more mistakes. Stiles wishes he had a place to put what can't be spoken out loud, but it's...a lonely place, inside of his own head.

So, yes. Stiles might think that Derek is a fucking genius. But he never knew, never would have thought in a million years, that him thinking that would put pressure on him – to the point where he couldn't even fucking write out of fear of what Stiles would think of it. It's like Lydia said, then, and it must be true. That Derek feared so fucking much that one day Stiles would wake up and realize that Derek isn't that god damn great, after all, that he went and did the most unthinkable thing. Fear fucking does that to people.

“I couldn't admit that I...I'm not really like that.” He purses his lips and stares at his hands, watching as he toys with his own fingers. “...I'm not like that, at all.”

Of course he thinks that. If for one second Derek thought he was anything more than some huge burden on the world, it would probably mean life as they know it was capsizing in on them all. The man is a professional guilt-tripper, on himself. “Why would you ever think I had those kind of fucking expectations of you?”

“Because you do.”

“I don't.”

“You do,” he insists this with a thrust of his hands outwards, and then finally meets Stiles' eyes head on. “What was it that you said to me that one time? That my books singlehandedly got you through the worst time in your life -” Stiles remembers that. Both saying it, and believing it pretty wholeheartedly. Still does, as a matter of fact. Some people have a musician, or a movie, or a show, and it's just the thing for them. That one thing that reached out to them in their worst and darkest time. For Stiles, that thing is Derek's books. He's always been honest with him about that. “...you say shit like that, and then wonder why I care so much what you think.”

“It was true, and you deserved to hear it,” he says, doesn't even bother denying it. “I don't understand why me giving you a compliment makes me, like, the villain in all this...”

“Oh, my God, that's not what I'm saying,” he squeezes his eyes shut for a second. “This is coming out all wrong.”

“Maybe you should fucking write it down, then,” Stiles mutters, and he knows it isn't fair to say, but does anyway.

Derek bears it like he knows he deserves it, and then sets his shoulders and breathes. “I'm just trying to explain. Why I did that. It wasn't your fault, Jesus, of course it wasn't – it was all mine. It's because I -”

“It's because you can't handle anything that isn't god damn awful, is what it is,” Stiles snaps, and Derek palms his forehead, but doesn't deny it. “It's like you genuinely believe you don't deserve a single good thing you get that isn't pain, on some level. Since I wasn't, you know,” he waves his hands in the air for a second, “burning your house down or emotionally manipulating you, then you just had to go and make up a version of me that was. Right? Is that about the size of it?”

His jaw is clenched, his eyes averted, and he says nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing, and Stiles fucking knows he's right. Has finally cracked the god damn hidden code that is Derek Hale. He cannot believe how long it's taken him to get this, but finally, he's figured it out.

“I guess I should apologize for not making you miserable,” he crosses his arms over his chest. “I can't believe you can do that to yourself.” Laura was god damn right.

“Evidently, I don't deserve anything that isn't awful, if I do things like this -”

“Evidently, you're a fucking dumbass.”

Derek gives him a look, shakes his head, and then looks away. “Where is this conversation going? Why did you come here? Is it just the final grain of salt in the last wound?”

Stiles throws his hands in the air, and grits out, “I don't know why I came. Because – Erica told me you were being sued, and I was like I don't care about that, but apparently I do care about it because I couldn't sleep last night, and I can't stop thinking about it, and so I had to come here and tell you that you're fucking dumb, just publish that book, I'll survive. Like, oh, big deal, the entire world will hate me and think I'm Kate 2.0. I'll make it out alive.”

Derek has spent enough time with Stiles, now, that he easily wades his way through the sentence and picks out the parts that actually matter. “I'm not putting that book out,” he says with little room for argument.

“Why?” Stiles asks, stepping closer to him – and it's the closest they've been in weeks. “What's it even matter anymore?”

“It matters.”

“Why, Derek?” Closer, still. “Is that your way of punishing yourself for doing that?”

Derek huffs, his upper lip curling. “You throwing that ring in my face was enough punishment for two decades,” he says in a low voice, and Stiles doesn't let himself feel bad about, that. He deserved it, at the time.

“Then what is it?”

For a moment, it really seems like he's not going to answer. He's going to evade the question, and they'll never be able to talk about it, and they'll never work it out, and everything is going to end. And, maybe, Stiles will read about it in the real book number five. He'll read all about the things that Derek couldn't force himself to say at the time, that he had to go running off to his pen and paper to finish.

That's the thing about the creatives, and the writers, and the artists. You think they're these open, honest people, but sometimes they turn out to be the most terrified out of anyone else. Maybe that's where it all comes from.

But, for maybe the first time since they met, Derek chooses to speak instead of locking it away for a one-liner. “The look you gave me when you read that,” he begins, as though it's being forced out of him with a gun pointed to his head. “...the way you fucking cried like that. All the times in my life I've felt like I really am the biggest piece of shit ever created, that just went ahead and topped them all.”

Stiles sighs.

“I've lived with a lot of things, but I couldn't live with that.” He rubs his jaw for a moment, eyes looking far away. “And I won't work with those people, anymore. They can sue me all they want, I don't care – it's a couple million, and then it's over, and I won't have to deal with them any longer.”

A couple million. Stiles can't even imagine what it would be like to say something like that so offhand. Like oh, just a couple dollars.

“I never wanted to hurt you,” Derek says, reaching his hand out and grabbing Stiles' shoulder. Stiles allows the touch, this time, leans just slightly into it, but not too much. “You know that, right? I never, ever in my life, wanted to do something like that to you.”

“Well,” Stiles croaks. “You did.”

“I know.” The thing is, he really probably does. Stiles laid in his bed crying five nights in a row over that, which doesn't even include the time he cried in the backroom of Erica's coffee house and the other time he cried in Scott's car, or the time he cried at his dad's house. He's cried all over the place. But, while he was the human personification of a Taylor Swift song circa 2012, Derek was out there somewhere hurting just as much. Not even about the fact that Stiles left him, but about the fact that it was, really and truly, all his fault. And he knew Stiles was out there crying. And that must've been to much for him to even emotionally bear.

The kind of pain that not even writing can put into words. He's said that before.

“I don't know where to go from here,” Stiles says, honestly. “I don't know what to even...do.”

Derek's hand is still on his shoulder, clutching it tightly like he thinks that at any second, Stiles is going to turn around and walk out that door, and that'll be the end of it. Stiles should do that. He should. Shouldn't he? “Never talk to me agan. Most likely.”

“Okay, you know what?” Stiles glares at him. “You are not to be trusted with your own life decisions, apparently, so I guess I'm on my own with this one.”

For a moment, there's silence, and Derek breaks it. “That manuscript doesn't even exist anymore,” why he says this, either to put himself in better light or just to say it, so Stiles will know, Stiles will never be entirely sure of. “I deleted it off my laptop. Burned it in the fireplace.”

“You burned it?”

He shrugs. “I couldn't risk throwing it out in case people are going through my trash -” Jesus, imagine having to worry about something like that? “...and shredding it page by page would take too much time, so...yeah. Lit it up.”

Stiles frowns. “Why didn't you invite me? I'd have brought marshmallows.”

They stare at each other, and then Derek's lips quirk up in the corners, but not a full smile. Not yet. There shouldn't be any full smiles between them, at the moment, either way. “The only thing I can say anymore is that I'm so fucking sorry, and I regret every second of it, and if I could go back in time, and if I could change it, if I could take it back, all that. You know all that.”

Stiles knows that Derek is sorry. Of course he does. But he just doesn't know what to do with that sorry. What is he meant to do with it? Forgive, and forget, and walk away? And find someone else who isn't Derek fuckin' Hale?

Are there any odds of him finding anyone even close to Derek Hale? If there are, they aren't good. Derek is one of those standalone people who might be a mistake, but the best fucking mistake a person will ever make in their lives. The mistake that's worth it, in the end.

“You,” he jabs his bony finger into Derek's collarbone, hard, “hurt my god damn feelings.”

Derek nods. “I'm sorry,” he says again, but this time there's a small smile on his face.

“Just for my own personal references,” he pokes Derek again, “what exactly was, like, the plan?”

“The plan?”

“The plan. For the book.”

He inhales, looks amused. “Well. It was going to be about how you're Satan Incarnate...”

“Ah, finally a true depiction.”

“...and you destroyed my ability to love anyone or anything else because you washed the taste clean out of my mouth...”

“Jesus Christ.”

“...and then I was going to put it out, and people were going to riot and eat it up and make effigies out of you to beat with sticks. And then, after a sufficient amount of time had passed, we were going to get back together and everyone would riot again and make more effigies out of you, but for different reasons, of course,”

“Of course.”

“...and then I'd write another book about how you saved my life, and we'd get married, and the end. Is that good enough, for your own personal reference book?”

“I think the details are specific enough,” he says, narrowing his eyes. “I cannot believe you thought I would have ever, ever gone along with this.”

Derek rubs his forehead for what must be the thousandth time. “Why are you still here, Stiles? Shouldn't you be storming out in a fit?”

“Most likely, yes,” he straightens his shirt out. “But I am still standing here, yet.”

“What are you going to do?” Derek asks – and that's when Stiles knows the choice is entirely up to him. Enough has been said here, today, that Stiles knows how Derek feels about him. And Spark? Whatever the fuck that book was? That wasn't the real story. The real story maybe hasn't even been told yet.

Stiles is the one who gets to decide whether they go on, and the choice feels easy and hard at the same time. “I'm really scared,” he says, carefully, slowly. Picking his words as delicately as possible. “I'm really, really scared that you're going to do this again.”

“I'm scared you're going to leave me again,” Derek says back.

“I couldn't deal with having to go through this again.”

“Neither could I.”

Stiles huffs. “...and I couldn't deal with not being with you, at all.”

“Me, either.”

He reaches out, puts his hand against the side of Derek's neck, and just stares at the way that their skin looks like that, side to side. “You're not going to write about this, are you?”

Derek's full set of teeth shine in the answering grin. “Yeah. Probably. Is that okay?”

“I appreciate you asking me that,” he says, tapping his index finger against his skin. “And, uh...yeah. Sure. You can write about me.”

“I can write about you,” he repeats, stepping marginally closer, until they're nearly chest to chest. He looks into Stiles' eyes, holds them there with intensity. “Are you going to give me anything to write about, then?”

“If you want me to hurt you just so you can get a good book out of it,” he shakes his head, “then I won't do that. I couldn't do that. And – you're not a bad person.”

“I am.” He insists, and this time, when he moves closer, he brushes his lips up against Stiles', just barely, and Stiles doesn't move away. “I've been trying to tell you, and you just won't listen.”

Stiles has seen the real Derek ten times over, and it's a Derek that very, very few people have ever seen before. It's not the distant one, like from interviews, and it's not the cold, jaded, bitter one, like from his books. But it's the one who waits up late nights for Stiles, and treats him better than he deserves, and acts like there's nothing, and no one on planet earth, who's ever been as fucking incredible as he is.

People don't get that. People talk, but they don't understand.

The person who understands it the least of all, is Derek. Derek has fucked up, multiple times, there's no denying that. More likely than not, he will fuck up again, and again. Like Laura said, it might just be in his nature, that after every thing he's been through, he can't comprehend getting to have something.

But Stiles wants to marry him. So fucking bad. More than anything else in the world.

“You are making a mistake,” Derek says, like a promise. And Stiles can't help but smile at that, for some reason. Now that he understands how Derek plays the game, and how he thinks...well. He just has to figure out how to get Derek to see what Stiles sees. It won't be easy. It'll be worth it. There's always a difference between those two.

****

_It used to be that I'd sit and spend nearly all my days clawing through wreckage. Because I guess I thought that that's essentially what writing really boiled down to – as though if you're brave enough to immerse yourself fully into your past, especially the most painful parts of it, then you must be brave enough to write. What I never realized back then, with those first four books, is that pain is not the universal crash course workshop for art. I thought pain made me interesting and clever, and I thought since I'd been through some shit that meant I was some sort of naturally gifted wiseman or whatever the hell. I thought I was doing everyone a favor. As it all would turn out, only writing what hurts doesn't make me a fucking genius. There are a million emotions in the world, some there are words for, some there aren't, and if I can't spend even a fraction of a page on any others aside from the ones that burn, then I'm not a fucking writer. I'm a fucking martyr. There's a difference. (Drown [unpublished manuscript], Derek Hale pg. 14)_


End file.
